Why I Cut My Hair
Yesterday on BlogHer I wrote about my hair.
As a child, I had long braids that I refused to cut, much to my mother's chagrin. I fancied myself Laura Ingalls Wilder. As a teenager in the eighties, I was a spiral-permed, ratted, claw-banged glory. In college, I shoved my ponytail through the hole in the back of my ever-present ball cap or let it pour out from under my do-rag. (I looked more Axl than gangsta.)
After college, I embarked on a fifteen-year fight with my hair. It's very fine -- so fine I can fit my entire ponytail into the smallest hair bauble or elastic band. My hair, when long and uncurled, resembles the head elf in the movie version of Lord of the Rings. The boy elf. The hot one. It looked good on him, not so much on me. So I resigned myself for many, many years to one of the best styles for fine hair: the chin-length bob. And during the entire reign of my chin-length bob, people I met always thought they already knew me, because I looked exactly like half of the upper Midwest.
Frustrated, I tried to grow it out again. I did The Rachel in the late '90s. It looked terrible on me. You could see through the layered parts if the sun was strong. Why did I do it? Boys. Men, I guess they were, but I still thought of them as boys. Boys liked long hair, and I wanted to be liked by boys.
Credit Image: Wikipedia
But when I really thought about it, I wanted to be the girl with the short hair. I wanted to be Helen Slater in The Legend of Billie Jean. I wanted to be Winona Ryder in Reality Bites. I wanted to be Demi Moore in G.I.Jane.
I wanted to transcend my hair.