2
October 2003
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My
hair can only be described with one word right now: Whatever I was experiencing last night, hair cut remorse or mourning my locks or whatever, has passed. This was going to be much longer, as I wanted to talk about why I’ve always loved long hair more and how that’s because of my mom and the horrible page boy I had till age five, but I realized today that however I felt yesterday was just silly and it’s pointless to expound on it for dozens of paragraphs. All I know is that I feel a little bit freer right now, as ridiculous as that may sound. Getting so much cut off was a literal weight lifted off of me. And maybe it’s a girl thing, or just human nature, to be attached to things about you that you feel like define you. Other people probably didn’t define me by my hair, but I did. I was the girl with the long blonde hair. It’s easier to be that girl than the tall girl or the big girl or the one with bad skin. And that’s half the reason it needed to go. Why was I looking at myself like that? It’s immature and backwards. Because no one should define themselves by one attribute, even if it is the one they like the most about themselves. We’re all more than our hair or our eyes or our muscular arms or our voice or our sense of humor. It’s common sense, right? But we often get mired down in things that don’t make any sense, because the power of doubt is often greater than the ability to believe in yourself. There’s this amazing interview with Jennifer Aniston from two years ago where she talks about when she chopped her long hair off (because anything involving Jennifer Aniston and hair is a big deal), but unfortunately the entire article is no where online. So I’m simply paraphrasing from memory. Basically she said that she loved her long hair, and it made her feel good about herself, and she felt like she could hide behind it. Once she realized that her hair had become her grown-up security blanket, she cut it off. According to the article, she didn’t really like the short cut or how she looked with chin-length hair and planned to grow it back out (which she has), but that getting rid of it was like a cleansing of sorts. Lenny Kravitz has said the same thing about cutting off his dreads. He equated it to literally cutting off the bad parts of himself, the things he wanted to be rid of. He came to the decision abruptly, and he’s said that as soon as he realized they had to go he asked Lisa Bonet to take them out immediately. It takes a long time to grow your hair out; I’ve been growing mine since I was 22. (In a fit of independence I cut several inches off in time for my DC internship and kept it fairly short through graduation.) Well, I’ve done a lot of emotional growing in that time too, and I’m a very different woman at 27 than I was at 22. (When I didn’t even consider myself a woman at all.) So why did I want to hold on to something, or a part of me, that I’d long since grown past? So now, I feel like I have sassy hair and it’s amazing how much bigger my eyes look. And that’s always a plus. Join the notify.
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