On Tuesday, the day after I returned to my apartment in Minneapolis after a three-week road trip out to Washington State, I decided I needed a haircut. It was August. I was going back to start teaching high school English in a matter of brief weeks. My hair looked droopy, shapeless, and both wilted and frizzy in the same minute. I had reached that odd point that occurs where I could go no further. I could not stand one more minute of my current hairstyle.
I made an appointment.
“So what are we doing?” asked Zach, the stylist available for my 2:00 appointment at Vizi’s salon just down the block. I had never been there before, but had passed the pinkish 1920’s style one-and-a-half story building on Hennepin Avenue many times. He looked at my reflection in the mirror while pulling my long blond hair down my back to see the ends.
“Well,” I said, “I’m considering donating my hair for cancer patients.” In fact, I had measured my hair at home with a tape measure by looking in the mirror and craning my neck to see where the blond ripples fell. My godmother died a year-and-a-half ago from Pancreatic Cancer and I had been growing my locks ever since. It was eight inches to just below my ear lobe, the bare minimum of donating
“But,” I paused, considering my personal life. “I’m recently single again, and, you know, the guys seem to like the long hair.”
The words sat like cold pieces of stone deliberately placed to line a walkway while I looked at the glare in the mirror that flashed at my eyes from the window behind me.
Zach shrugged and touched the top of my scalp, moving his hands down the blond threads. “That is true,” he said, clearly speaking for the heterosexual population of his gender. “It’s sort of weird, but true.”
I looked in the mirror at my wilted, frizzy, droopy, shapeless mass of blond almost-curls. And in this moment I had to face something other than my reflection.
I am a woman who has two master degrees. I read books. I believe in gender equality. I got a 30 on my ACT score, grew up getting angry with teachers who asked only the boys to carry heavy stacks of books back to the library, and never once hesitated to raise my hand during a discussion if I had an opinion on the subject. Both my parents were feminists. My mom worried about me watching Dukes of Hazard as a child because she didn’t want me to think that’s how women had to act, that all they had to offer was beauty. They didn’t buy me Barbie Dolls because, again, women are more than objects, more than beautiful playthings.
I am also a teacher. And I constantly encourage my female students to be strong and independent. I encourage them to think for themselves. It almost hurts when I see one who follows a boy around like an obedient robot.
“Really,” said the smarty-pants persona in my mind as I considered the eight-inch dilemma in front of me. “Are you seriously considering NOT cutting your hair just because guys like long hair?”
Despite all my positive feminist background, the truth is I was. The truth is I wanted very much to look pretty in my eharmony profile picture.
My background is not just the academic. There is a part of me that wants to be sexy. A part of me that wants to be attractive to men. A part of me that worries endlessly about my appearance, despite the fact that my brain realizes there is more to me than the image. It’s a dichotomy I have never been quite able to reconcile.
Which is perhaps why I married a man I loved and later discovered had a pornography addiction.
During the nine years of our relationship, our sex life went from hot to warm to tepid to lonely. Because he was my first love, first person I had sex with, I wasn’t absolutely sure about what was wrong. Perhaps sex-lives just slow down, I thought. Maybe this is normal.
When I discovered the truth, the hours of pornography on our computer, the $300-a-month cable bills, the nearly eight-grand spent on porn on credit card statements hidden from me for years, I realized it was not “normal.”
And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wondered what about me caused it.
There is a voice inside me who worries about what men think when they look at her. There is a part that notes what they pay attention to, what they seem to love. There is a girl within who is forever worried about the mirror, a girl forever analyzing, and condemning what she sees.
“I love when you have your hair down,” said my husband, “you just look so--,” and he paused to shrug his shoulders, shake his head, and raise his eyebrows.
Another man I dated after my divorce would pause while we indulged in the sensation of being wrapped in each other in bed, looking at my hair, touching it, gazing. “Goldilocks,” he’d say, smiling back at my eyes and surrounding me with himself.
All of this I wanted to ignore as I sat in the salon chair trying to decide what to do. I wanted to believe me, with short hair, was enough.
Zach waited for me to figure it out, lips in a line, hands on his hips. It felt like weights were on my shoulders as I considered my fears. And then a counterpart to the smarty-pants voice in my head, the vixen within, suddenly piped up, “Are you kidding me? Like we can’t rock the sexy bob.”
I looked at Zach. “Cut it off,” I said. “I just heard what that sounded like out loud.”
He laughed and grabbed his scissors, “and you were like, Hmm- I don’t like that bitch, right?”
I laughed (though bitch had never quite been the word in my mind) and he bindered my hair eight inches up, ready to cut it all off in a neat little bundle.
I held my breath and he started cutting. “I’m so glad you decided to do it,” he said. “This is going to look great.”
I didn’t know if it would look great or terrible or frizzy, droopy, and shapeless still. All I knew was that I was feeling lighter already.
I left the salon and the only word to describe me in that moment is buoyant. I was full of light and air as I returned to my apartment, tingling with the uncertainty of this new look, this new persona. I didn’t know if the men on eharmony would like the change, but I did. I felt like I could make light bulbs glow when they weren’t even plugged into a socket.
Then I reached in my purse for the ziplock bag that held my hair. I threw it on the dining table.
It sat there. Blond and bindered. Didn’t move. Just sat on the table.
Gross isn’t the word, but it was completely uninspired. Lifeless.
“That’s not sexy,” I thought, considering this part of me removed that used to hold magical powers.
“That’s just hair.”
And like that I realized that I was what was sexy about me with long hair. I was this glowing, floating, electrical little entity walking down Hennepin Avenue and this was just a pile of dead cells sitting in a bag.
All of the smart-girl rhetoric, the knowing that I was more than an image suddenly felt true. And while it’s a lesson I learned only after turning 32, and one I imagine I will have to learn again many times, it felt like a change had happened.
Like I didn’t have to go to the mirror to see what I was like.
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