So, I’ve never really been what society deemed “acceptably female.” I went through my little pink-hating, rebellion infused phase where I hated everything girly and found a perverse glee in claiming my brother’s Hot Wheels as my own.
That phase passed, but I soon found myself in this weird limbo, falling in the cracks between the traditionally accepted types of feminine and the accepted types of not-feminine. I did not really like pink any more than I had, and my make-up skills still basically consist of slathering on black lipstick and rubbing on an uneven line or two of eyeliner. But I wasn’t sporty. In fact, I honestly could not care less about any form of athletics. So, most of the spectrum of traditionally girly was out for me, and the sporty look wasn’t going to fit either.
But, having contented myself with these awkward aspects of myself, I saw no reason not to cut my hair short in my senior year of high school. Oh, it wasn’t all that short. My father wouldn’t stand for that, so my mother took me to the hairdresser she’d been going to since her college days, and he gave me a short cut that I sort of didn’t hate? So, that was great. And I kept it for I while, at least until I got to college. There, I decided my budget did not have room for a monthly relaxer, so I went to the salon and cut my hair again. It wasn’t really that short then either, and I let it be until Christmas when I cut off all my processed hair and let my natural curls grow. And they grew and grew for about two years, with me shaving off patches whenever I felt like I had too much on my plate to deal with such a time-consuming vanity. I eventually ended my first semester of junior year with just a patch of curly blonde hair on top of my head, and shaved everywhere else. All of that had gone over surprisingly well with my conservative dad, but I had always had at least several fistfuls of hair on my head.
Then I got my college roommate to cut it all off in our bathroom at eight in the evening on a Monday. And I was bald, pretty much. Like, there’s about an eighth of an inch left on the top of my head, and everywhere else is shorter still. The amount of “snatched bald” jokes I’ve heard in last couple of days since I cut it have been ever increasing. And I love it. I love my bald head. I can barely stop rubbing it and grinning at myself whenever I pass a mirror. But I think what has stood out the most to me out of this experience is how my hair journey has affected my idea of my own femininity.
When I first cut my hair in high school, I was too busy being overwhelmed by SAT tests, college applications, and activities to put on those applications, to worry about what my hair said about me and my perceived femininity. Also, I didn’t really have friends, and I didn’t really care what anyone thought of me in high school. But then I came to college, cut my hair again, and finally began to feel as if some of my female-ness had been lost. I began to notice how all the cute little freshmen girls would flirt with all the cute little freshmen boys. They looked up at them through their fluttering eyelashes, and giggled lightly as they fidgeted their little feet. But mostly, they played with their hair. Stroking, braiding, twisting, combing through, I saw all of it. Those girls never left their hair alone. And I suddenly found myself resenting all the small, completely natural things that took that arsenal away from me. I was tall enough to look most of the boys square in the eye, speaking deeper than some of them, with feet larger than many of them. And my hair was short and stiff. There would be no flipping here. I felt I had, either by nature or my own choices, been stripped of all my femininity, and there was none left.
But I shaved my head three days ago, and almost as soon as I did I realized that something had changed. I won’t claim that the shaved head alone was what brought back my confidence as a growing woman, but I think it was the piece that slid into place and made me take a step back and actually look at myself. Standing in front of the mirror in my steel-toed boots, men’s joggers, and pretty eye make-up, with my hair less than half an inch long, I did not feel anything less than a beautiful woman. And the feeling hasn’t faded in these last few days. Will it? Maybe, I don’t know, but I’m not particularly bothered. One thing this whole short hair thing has shown me is that, my femininity is so much more than what I wear and what my voice sounds like and what my hair looks like. So if those things change, and I lose more obvious outward signs of femininity, I can always find a new way, a way that suits me, to be who I am. I am a woman, and I am so much more than my hair.