Sunday, the 26th of April, 1998.
On a little step stool, I stood at the bathroom sink looking up at the mirror hanging above it. Taking a deep breath, I stretched my right thumb across the trimmer I was holding and flipped up the ‘on’ switch.
It started buzzing, sending little shivers across my palm and down my arm. The vibrations quickly reached their way to my heart, it was beating rapidly. I felt exhilarated. I was ready.
Another deep breath.
Then, positioning the clipper at the top of my forehead, I ran it into my hair for the first time. There was no going back. Every hair on my body was raised as the thrill of what I was doing rolled through every cell of me. My ears tickled. I kept going. One path of dark hair cleared after another. Then, leaning forward over the sink, I awkwardly reached behind towards the back of my head, starting at the base of my neck and moving upwards. One pass after another. Then again sideways from ear to ear.
I stood up again, looking at myself in the mirror, bits of fallen hair clinging to my neck and shoulders. It was done. A sudden bit of doubt crept into my thoughts but just as quickly dissipated, there was nothing I could do about it anyway. I smiled with elated disbelief at what I had just done.
My hair was gone.
Save for my immediate family, nobody could tell what I had done without close scrutiny. My hijab was my friend and collaborator in this. It gave literal cover, yes, and provided privacy and a place of safety from under which I could explore the bounds of my self-assertion, allowing for play and expression, being an object so commonplace, so ordinary and prevalent, that I could be myself under its protection, without fear, shielded from intrusive social judgement and unwelcome opinion.
My hijab was my shelter, under whose auspices the act of shaving off my hair could not, for that moment, be anything but simply, intimately, and only mine.
Of course, it would eventually be known to wider circles outside those closest to me, but the expression itself wasn’t attention-seeking in nature. I didn’t like drawing attention that I didn’t actively seek, but I was determined, albeit not very consciously, to do things my way when I could. I just wanted to be myself without it turning into a ‘thing’. Attention brought with it immediate otherness. I wasn’t part of the in-crowd at school, nor was I a loner. I had a couple of friends I stayed close to, was generally unassuming, and the less eyes upon me, the better.
Once, while waiting to be picked up at the end of a school day, one of the more popular kids came up to me. I don’t think she’d spoken two words to me before that. Her name was Karen. She was standing nearby and must have noticed something as I was adjusting my hijab, which at the time, I couldn’t do as discreetly as I would have liked.
One unforeseen drawback to my hair being only a few millimetres long was that when I had my hijab on, it behaved like a silk slip underneath. The cotton scarf, flattening my hair forward, would slowly slide in that direction. Every little while, I’d have the rim of my hijab reaching halfway down my line of sight. The tiny-hairs-turned-tiny-spikes would prevent me from being able to simply pull it back, and I’d have to push in my entire hand between the hijab and my head to make the necessary adjustment so that it could once again rest comfortably where it belonged.
All I knew of her was this: she was skinny, fair-skinned, and tall (everyone is tall unless they’re my height or shorter). She had hazel eyes, soft medium-length brown hair, and was part of the admired clique of girls that were known to all among my peers…pretty much everything I wasn’t. She was also Greek, I remember this fact for it being one of the rarer nationalities that make up our private school’s international student body. I recall wondering a time or two, as a passing curiosity concerning things foreign, interesting, and unfamiliar, what it might be like to be her.
Anyway, she came up to me, and being taller, leaned over to peer under the edge of my hijab towards my hairline. She straightened up, smiled approvingly, and said, “I like you. You’re cool.” I smiled back. The compliment felt good. But an instant later, her bestowment of approval registered as an insult. Was she expecting me to be grateful? It bothered me that she offered her comment like some kind of blessing, and I didn’t appreciate feeling like I was suddenly someone whose value needed to be validated by another. If there had been any part of me that thought her or her friends anything special, wondered how gratifying it might feel to be noticed by them, that interaction immediately dispelled it.
While holding my smile, I mumbled a ‘thanks’ as she called over her friends to share her discovery with. My 15 minutes of fame took up all of 15 seconds, for I was not a person of consequence and the novelty quickly passed. Which was fine by me.
I miss it. I miss the stimulating sensation that tickled across my head anytime I walked as the air rolled over my hair and between it. I miss the lightness of it. I miss the ease with which sweat can be wiped away. I miss wearing hats without worrying about needing to accommodate a bun or a ponytail, or having to deal with flattened hair afterwards.
I’ve been thinking about doing it again. Truthfully, I think about it all the time.
My relationship with my hair is…layered. It has been short for much of my life. A few times shaved off, most times at various lengths or styles of a ‘boy cut’. Then about 10 years ago I started to grow it out. I have always hated the transition phase of growing my hair. I hate when it starts to get longer at the back of my neck and around my ears, as it starts to itch and I can’t leave it alone, I have to constantly fiddle with it. When it got longer, it became easier to tolerate with an undercut and a better understanding of how to manage it. My younger sister, who knows girly things, and who went to hair school, was a great help in this. She was mortified once when she learned how I dried my hair after showering. “You what?! No, no, no. You never pull on it, and you don’t use a towel to do it either.” With affection and satisfied enthusiasm for having now something to teach her older and utterly clueless sister, she continued, “Use a t-shirt, and you bend over and gently plump it from the bottom, just the ends. Cup your hands, and plop, plop, just like that. Keep the curls intact…and use lots of leave-in conditioner.”
For the first time in a long time, people started treating me differently. I wasn’t so obviously queer anymore…at least not upon first glance, not to the general public. I no longer got the weird looks as I went into women’s washrooms, no longer tapped on the shoulder or made aware, with suspicion and mild disdain thinly veiled in feigned politeness that, excuse me, this is the line to the women’s restroom.
Once, at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee with a friend and her young son, I came out of the women’s restrooms to join her where she was waiting for me outside, and she asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, why?”
“I don’t know, some random woman came out and said to me, ‘You should go in there, your boy needs you!’”
I chuckled at the absurdity. “Whaaat? Your boy needs you?” then somewhat more quietly, “What woman? That one there?”
She had been standing about 15 feet from us and was now walking away.
“Yeah, did something happen in there?”
I stood there for a second, figuratively scratching my head.
“No…I just…smiled at her, I guess?” The woman had been standing at the dryer while I was washing my hands and I saw her looking my way. I did what any polite person would, and gave a slight nod and a close-mouthed smile.
It was such a bizarre occurrence, though perhaps not so unexpected considering where we were. Your boy. We laughed it off…but those words, they stayed with me.
Given that I do nothing to help my case by way of makeup or accessories or the shaping of my eyebrows or any number of things that may indicate “womanhood”, I was often quickly read as “other”. At least, that’s what I assume are the reasons. I can’t think why else. But how could those things alone suggest otherness? Sure, my clothes were usually tomboyish (there’s that word again) and loose-fitting, but they did little to conceal my chest or hips. Why couldn’t they, and the softness of my features and voice, not be enough to counter people’s perceptions? I felt that I was always being outed without my active involvement, and I hated it.
I hated being “read” as something untrue to myself, or having meanings inferred about my being that I was not fully consenting of. I have never been able to understand what it is to “be a woman” in the ways that seem generally understood the world over—though I can never deny that I thoroughly and intricately am one of my own configuration—but there always seemed to me an element of masculinity attributed to my character, based on how people interacted with me undoubtedly due to my appearance, that I did not inherently feel or express. The rough sort of masculinity, the hard exterior type of male bravado that has never been part of my personality but was always unfairly put on me…like a “kick me” sign pinned on the back of an unsuspecting victim by a cruel and ignorant hand.
I remember thinking that as Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver was beautiful, as was Demi Moore, while being tough as sh*t in G. I. Jane, and I was so in love with Susan Powter’s platinum super cropped hair—I’d have to fry mine into oblivion to reach that colour, though. Robin Tunney too, in Empire Records. I wanted and felt a connection and pull to that kind of womanhood.
When I wore my hijab, my being was never in question. From what the world could see, my outside matched my inside, that is, my appearance gave nothing to cause concern. But of course, there’s so much more to me, and so much more of me. I was not, in fact, only what the world saw. I wish I could remember the inner workings of my mind at 11 or 12 years old, as I was moving through figuring out my place in the bigness of everything. I wish I could more fully remember my thought process at 13, on that day when I took the plunge and shaved it all off, as I was navigating what must have been bubbling up for me in the discordant ways in which my sense of identity and the outer world’s nonsensical rules converged. But I am certain that, in addition to pure self-expression, and in response to the judgements and discourse I heard around me, I did what I did to declare that I am a girl, I am me, and my hair isn’t what determines that. Hair is just hair. It takes away nothing.
As it turns out, to the world beyond my personal space, hair is not just hair. Now, my longer hair, in betrayal to my younger self’s emphatic hopeful declarations, has allowed me to experience what it is to be seen “normally” and move in the world more securely. People no longer do second takes, they see no contradictions and need not make any split-second calculations to determine what to make of me, and I no longer have to anticipate such interactions and counter them with extra preplanned niceties to put them at ease. And it has been refreshing, to finally feel this, to experience what it must be like to not be othered based on an ideal only others see and I do not.
What’s more…I finally feel pretty.
Yet, this particular ease of being I have lately experienced comes with a great deal of sadness and longing. With it, I cannot help but feel the loss of a self I used to be, and I grieve for that past version of me, to whom I feel I’ve been so bitterly disloyal.
And so…I’ve been thinking about doing it again, shaving it off.
But I hesitate.