H is for “Hair” in my version of the Alphabytes.
Warning…wordy with many pictures. Follow the link if you are kinda bored and have time to kill.
I have a love-hate relationship with my hair. On one hand, it is a pretty damn good head of hair. It is thick and resilient and holds a curl well when I can be bothered to do anything with it. It grows pretty fast, thank goodness. On the other hand, in its natural state, it is half-assed wavy/straight and generally looks unkempt unless braided or otherwise physically restrained. Moreover, I am growing out an extremely ill-chosen haircut
which I blundered into getting during the depths of a winter’s worth of seasonal depression and a fit of self-consciousness over my extremely long hair. I’d kept reading other smartasses online opining about how grody they felt that extremely long hair was, how unstylish, dorky, and generally lame, etcetera. Now normally I don’t give a shit if my personal aesthetic pleases or displeases anyone, but for some reason this struck home and I gradually came to feel very uncomfortable with the hair on my own head, so I had it chopped off.
This was extremely stupid.
I had long suspected I would look shitty with short hair. I did, indeed, look shitty.
I have a round pumpkin face which does NOT support a bob well. Hairdressers fall all over their shears to tell you that everyone looks good in a bob. Not everyone does. I don’t. I looked like a soccer mom. The hairdo didn’t fit my clothes, my face, my attitude. It was lame. So I dyed it red, because I could hardly make it worse. The red was good, though I am now thoroughly sick of it, but I haven’t gotten serious about stopping henna-ing it and letting it fade back to my natural light brown. Right now, my hair is a little below my shoulders, but not yet to bra-strap level. It makes a ponytail, but it is annoying and cheerleaderishly bouncy. It does do a nice twisty/tufty thing with the right kind of hinged hairclip, however.
About the only good that came of me cutting all of my hair off was that I donated the ponytail to Locks of Love, so I can only hope that some kid out there is now wearing my old hair with style.
As I have written before, hair carries a lot of cultural signifiers and symbolic baggage, but frankly I miss mine. I miss being able to sock it into a nice, tight, clean braid and have it all the way out of the way. I miss the dramatic, crazy hairstyles I used to be able to do. I even miss the huge, soggy, floppy bale of hair I would have to wrap up in a towel-turban after taking a shower. My extremely long hair was a long-term, significant part of my personal style, and part of what makes me look like me is missing until it can grow back. At least I can grow it back.
I think once I have long hair again, I am going to keep it. It is just too much a part of what I look like to dispense with it again. I don’t think I will ever have it down to my ass again…that really was too much hassle, but around waist-length looked good and was still pretty manageable.
