I am a person who either acts on impulse or is unable to come to a conclusion. The impulse part of my personality became apparently clear when on the first day of Thanksgiving break I was sitting at the hair dresser’s telling her to cut my hair above my shoulders, just chop it all off. I had cut my hair to just below my shoulders last fall because it was so dead from all the bleaching and dying that there was no salvaging it. At that point, I was feeling good about my hair, it looked good, I knew it was in desperate need of a trim and I figured it would grow back to its original length in no time. No biggie.
After I hit the year mark, it was at that awkward in between stage where it wasn’t really short but it wasn’t long either so I figured there was nothing I could do to make it grow longer, but there was something I could do to make it shorter. The difference between the two haircuts was that this time I instantly regretted cutting it off. I didn’t feel pretty or sexy with my new haircut, on the contrary, I felt like a five-year-old little boy. My new cut looked nothing like Taylor Swift or Jenifer Lawrence as I had envisioned it would. I was used to long hair, I knew how to style it and it fit my personality. But now, I didn’t feel like me without my long curly hair. Then, I started to think about the fact that almost every guy preferred girls with long hair. I started to feel really self-conscious and the only thing I could think about was growing out my hair. I looked up everything I could on how to make my hair grow faster, I started taking biotin, tried my luck with massaging my head while I laid upside down on my bed, some supposedly miraculous technique they call the “inversion method”. However, my hair was not any longer and the only things that continuously occupied my mind was growing it out and how much I absolutely hated it.
Once I realized that I was going to have to ride this one out until it grew back, I began to wonder why I hated my hair so much in the first place. For starters, I didn’t feel pretty and my confidence was pretty low. I talked to one of my friends who the year before cut her hair to her shoulders and she said it was one of the best things she could have done for her confidence. Like me, she was used to long hair and after cutting it off, she had many family members asking why she would even do that? She told me that she wanted a change and that her new hairstyle, regardless of the input of others, made her more confident. It’s easy to feel confident when you fit the societal standard of beauty with long, flowing, feminine hair, but if you are able to be confident while breaking the mold of what you are typically told is beautiful, then you are truly confident in your own skin. I decided that was the kind of confidence that I wanted. The confidence that rested on my own merit and how I saw myself rather than the confidence that accompanied the approval of others.
Along with that, I had a friend stop my worries about guys not thinking I was pretty anymore because I didn’t have long hair. To that complaint, my friend told me that any guy who didn’t like me just because I had short hair wasn’t a guy that I wanted to keep around anyway. If something as superficial as the length of my hair was to keep a guy from liking me, then he can go on his way and find another girl.
I still have days where I look in the mirror and want nothing more than to have the long hair I came into college with, but then I realize that its hair and will grow back, so for now, I need to enjoy it as it is and just be content with it! From cutting my hair I have learned that I am impulsive and obsessive and that I now have the perfect opportunity to work on my confidence. So to anyone contemplating trying something new with your hair, I say go for it! After all, it’ll grow back if you don’t like it.
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