Let’s Talk About Something Important: My Hair

Black

I was born after one of the worst winter snowstorms in 1997 with a shock of black hair, red skin, and no tears. I’ve been told that it was magical, and I’ve held onto that idea my whole life.

I saw a baby picture recently where that same hair was curly and short. I was brand new to Earth. Now I’m pretty used to it.

Brown

Very quickly, my hair turned brown. My parents were both born with white-blonde hair, and while my mom’s turned dark, my dad’s went black, then entirely white. 

I didn’t like my hair. It wasn’t pretty like the other girls I went to school with. I was indistinguishable. Unoriginal. Easily missed. Looked over.

It didn’t help that I consumed media about girls that were much older than me, who did incredible things, and who all had blonde hair. I wanted to be like them, look like them, feel like how I thought they felt. I wanted to be everything and do everything, just something that would give me attention. And the easiest way to do that was to be blonde.

Now that I work at schools, I see girls that look like me with that same hair. I wonder if they feel the same way. I really hope not.

Purple

I had to ask my dad for permission, but he didn’t care. He was hardly involved in the intricacies of my life, anyway. I remember it was a very indigo shade of purple, and I remember how much attention I got from my peers, and how long that attention didn’t last.

I didn’t have many friends in elementary school. Well, really in a way I did. I think most people at that age technically have friends, yet somehow still feel deeply lonely. There are so many photos of me with lots of other girls my age, but I still felt so lonely. I felt ostracized. I wasn’t as cute as the other girls, not as friendly, not as fun, not as skinny, and didn’t get any attention from boys. No matter what I did, what I wore, what I said, my peers looked at me like I was weird. Or maybe they didn’t, but that’s certainly how I felt.

I was a librarian’s daughter, sheltering myself out of oblivion and fear of the real world.

Black and Pink

In sixth grade, my mom and I had our hairdresser dye the top layer of my hair black, and underneath pink. My mom made me ask my dad again, probably so that he would feel included in the family dynamic. Still, he didn’t care. Or maybe he just wanted me to be me.

When I showed up at school, my classmates were shocked because I had always told them I hated the color pink. Pink signified something that I hated; blonde haired blue eyed popular girls that were hyper-feminine and wore expensive clothes and got the attention of boys. I was anti-pink and anti-femininity in the hopes of distinguishing myself as “not like other girls.” And to dye my hair that color gave me the dramatic irony and attention I still sought out.

I wanted to be the cool girl, whatever that meant. And I wasn’t like those other girls, I had pink hair and hated the color pink, and read books. How original, right? How superior of me.

Black and Blonde

Much later, I started to write a story that I shared online about a character with half black half blonde hair, and so I wanted to mimic that. Still trying to distinguish myself as being cool and an individual. It was then that I realized how much bleach can fry your hair.

Black

Seventh grade was a shitty year. Of course, because of puberty and middle school being horrible in general, but also because my dad died. 

When my parents got divorced, I moved back and forth between both apartments. While I didn’t love staying with my mom at the time, it was better than Dad’s. I’m not sure how many times I had to call my mom and tell her how Dad wouldn’t bother to buy groceries, or when I’d show up to stay for the week he’d have been sleeping in my bed because the TV in my room was the only one that worked, and he didn’t bother to buy himself a new one, or simply couldn’t afford it. Or how he treated me more like a roommate than as his daughter, telling me things about his life I never should’ve known about. Then, she and I talked about me moving in full-time with her. It was much later when we’d discuss how emotionally abusive and neglectful he had been. While I knew it wasn’t intentional, it still happened.

My dad agreed that it would be best for me to live with my mom. The last day I saw him alive was Easter. He died of heart failure in his apartment.

So, like any grieving, depressed, confused, unnoticed young girl, I dyed my hair black. At that point, I was getting into the “emo” style, but really I just wanted to exit my body and never return.

Not in a death way, just like in an I-wished-I’d-never-existed way.

But I couldn’t do that, so we bought some black hair dye.

Red

Eighth grade started looking up. All the girls my age had been experimenting with makeup for years by then, but I was doing it differently. I watched YouTube videos of women much older than me using expensive brands to create intricate and creative looks. I dyed my hair red and bought an Urban Decay eyeshadow palette and eyeliners and created a beauty blog that would soon die, but it was still something I was passionate about. I felt even more cool and different because I had deep, red hair. Literally, no one had hair like me.

Something else I was discovering was film. My drama class, taught by one of the most disliked Social Studies teachers, found a competition for students to create a short film for the chance to win a $25,000 technology grant. This teacher saw me, out of all his other students, and asked me to be his co-director and camera operator for this little movie. I think he realized I was one of the only students creative enough to help him accomplish this goal. At least that’s what I like to think.

So the class wrote a short film about spies infiltrating our school to persuade the other students to volunteer for charity. Every day in class, we went to various parts of the school to film on a tiny, low-quality camcorder. Near the end of the year, we presented the film to the entire school. I got to stand on the auditorium stage with my teacher, and my classmates cheered for me. For me! 

(And yes, we did win the grant money.)

At the end of the school year, that same teacher went around the room and told every student what he liked about us. I was the last in the class, and he told me how different I was from everyone else, that I was creative and passionate, and driven. He saw the creativity in me that I was praying for someone to see.

Red and Black

I dyed my hair an even brighter red and the ends black my freshman year of high school, just like another character I had started to write.

With my mom’s money, I bought more makeup, collecting as much as I could. On weekends I experimented and took pictures of my art. I’d post them on social media to get the attention I was desperately seeking, but under the guise of artistry and budding talent. People told me I posted too many selfies, and wondered why I didn’t wear makeup to school if I was so good at it.

Because what I did was art, not the casual stuff other girls sacrificed sleep for.

I started to realize how much I stuck out at a standard, massive public school. Just before my sophomore year was finished, I went

Blonde 

and transferred to a different school called Arts and Humanities. 

Blonde was the hair I coveted as a child but envied in middle school. My favorite dolls were blonde, my favorite actresses on TV were blonde, and even my mom was blonde. I attributed blonde hair to beauty and success and attention, and bleaching my hair got me a lot of it. The guy I had a crush on walked up to me in the cafeteria and told me he liked it. All my classmates told me how good it was. It was my most liked picture on Facebook and Instagram.

And all that attention made me wonder what was really going on. Do blondes really get more attention? Or was there a larger issue at play that was just too big for me to see yet?

Blue

Before I started at my funky new art school, I wanted to do something funky with my hair. My hairdresser wanted to try a new brand of dye, so I let her dye the ends of my hair blue and green, then decided to dye my whole head blue before I started at Arts. I still wanted to show people how different I was. That I fit in.

Unfortunately, the dye stained my skin, and every day when I went to wash my face or take off any makeup, there was a slight blue-green tint to my hands and face. Still, that price was worth the cost of individuality.

Black

At first, I dyed it brown, but soon noticed that brown plus blue equals green, so then I went to black, just like always, and crafted my aesthetic around that color. Every day I wore thick, black eyeliner, purple eyeshadow, and purple lipstick. I got my second pair of Doc Martens, also purple. I wore a lot of plaids. I had thick bangs that sat over circular glasses.

I was growing out of the librarian’s daughter and becoming something new, something I didn’t quite know yet.

I published a novel at 17. I discovered I was bisexual. I smoked weed and drank for the first time. I kissed the boy that liked my blonde hair. Kissed a girl, too. I became a full-fledged feminist and it was easy because all of my classmates were too. We were encouraged by our school to say, “fuck you” to institutions and authority.

Something even cooler that happened was that I gained friendships that felt more equal and genuine, some that I’ve kept until now when before they wouldn’t usually last past what school I was in at the time. Friendships that weren’t conditional, that were fun and lively but still had room to be serious and talk about the real shit we were all actively dealing with. I felt like I was finally living out the childhood I’d always wanted, but hadn’t ever gotten.

Red

Black boxed dye is hard to remove, but I did it. This time to a bloody, fiery red that seeped into my identity. I told people I thought red was the hair I should’ve been born with.

This was also the third time I copied my physical appearance to a character I was writing, and it was when I shaved the side of my head. My character shaved her head on a whim, and so did I. She’s become one of the most important characters I’ve ever written.

Purple

When I decided I wanted to move to Omaha for college, I wanted to make a big change, so I had the idea to dye my hair silver. But, because of a chemical malfunction during the bleaching process, it fell out in chunks onto the floor. To save what she could, my hairdresser dyed it purple with temporary dye. 

A patch of my hair at the back of my head was chemically cut short to where my regrowth started. Somehow I didn’t care so much, I thought it was a funny story, even though it traumatized my hairdresser. I often pointed it out to people.

No one would notice the chunk of hair missing if I could still turn a look, though.

Blonde

Eventually, it grew longer and faded to the blonde it was underneath, with a decent layer of brown regrowth. I dated a guy that didn’t really like me, even though he said he did, and begrudgingly spent nights with me in my dorm. He made me feel more like a mom than a girlfriend. I have no idea where he is now, or how he felt about our relationship. I had to force him to tell me that he wanted to break up with me. Shortly after, I downloaded Tinder. 

I met another guy, and after meeting him for the first time, I thought I was in love, which I knew was absolutely ridiculous even though I knew it was how I felt. We dated for a month until he came to the conclusion that I was too much for him.

I drove around Omaha, a city I didn’t know very well, and cried for hours. 

I met a second guy from Tinder and drove an hour and a half to meet him. All he wanted to do was hook up, but I didn’t. Afterward, I told my two best friends what happened, and they were shocked that I didn’t get murdered. After him, I bleached my hair again.

Bleaching my hair has a much different type of catharsis than dying it. Bleaching feels more like forgetting, rather than appreciating the past and burning it for a brighter future.

Blonde

New apartment, a new job that could hardly pay the rent (in fact it didn’t), and new hair. Then another new job that I thought was my dream job. By this time, being blonde had lost a lot of its glitter. In fact, I felt like I faded into the crowd a little too much. Who doesn’t know a bottle blonde by now?

Purple

Purple became a safe color for me, it’s fun and makes me feel like an individual.

I started dating another guy on Tinder. On paper, we were really different, but I didn’t mind. The first time we met, we went to see a movie the same day I did my taxes. He liked seeing movies with me and liked cooking with me and he gave copies of my books to his mom.

We went tie shopping with his parents once, and his dad discreetly matched the color of a tie to my hair.

Brown

I got tired of dyeing my hair and wanted to grow it out, so I went back to brown, but not my natural brown, a deeper, more chocolate brown. It was one of the only times I wanted to be boring.

But I can’t be “boring” for long. I think a certain level of chaos lives inside me. Sometimes that chaos feels like a different person has started driving the car that is me operating my life, sometimes that chaos feels like it completely envelopes me and I have no control over it. Usually, that chaos can be contained by dyeing my hair or doing stupid things, but sometimes it bubbles over in a way I cannot explain, I can only feel.

I decided, very suddenly in the grocery store parking lot that my boyfriend grew up going to, that I wanted to break up with him. 

I wanted to run away from everything in my life, for no reasonable reason. When I feel out of control I want to run away and hide so that I don’t have to face anyone. It’s a lot easier to become a ghost. Ghosts don’t hurt, they just confuse and upset.

It isn’t until I remember my responsibilities that I realize I can’t do that.

I broke up with him after having a silent panic attack one night when he was in town for the weekend. Shortly after we split, I dyed my hair blonde, and then orange.

Consciously or unconsciously, I can’t be boring.

Black

I always come back to black. I wear so much black people think it’s my favorite color. The thing about black hair is that it’s easy when I want to figure everything out. It covers everything I don’t want to see anymore.

It’s cleansing the same way that fire is.

Red

I stuck with black for a good while, but then my life rapidly changed. I watched every day at work how a pandemic wreaked havoc on the world, but in a way where I felt unfazed for a long time. I saw it every day, objectively told in front of my face, so how could I possibly be scared? Plus, I no longer had to go to school every day and I got every other week off of work.

But, I needed more change in my life and my job was no longer a good place to be, for me or other people, so I either had to find a new job after being at the job that shaped my adult life for 3 years, or I had to move back home to Lincoln after living in the city that shaped my adult life for 4 years.

Who knew it would be difficult to find a new job during a global pandemic? Clearly not me, so I moved home instead.

But just before that, I met up with someone I had been pining for after all those years at that “adult” job. He’d always made me feel like I was a kid, so I felt the need to prove my maturity to him. He was older and had more life experiences. Before I moved, we spent one night together. Then he got another girlfriend.

Since I was going back to my roots, I decided to dye my hair red again, the same way I did in high school. At the same time, I met a new guy, still through Tinder because where else was I supposed to look?

We couldn’t hang out in person without masks for a very long time because that’s what he wanted, and I wanted to be respectful of that, and safe myself. And then we did hang out in person, and for a while the relationship was pretty good, we watched horror movies in the theater together and made dinners and bought groceries, and went on a few trips. He made me laugh and he was smart. 

But then something happened that affected both of us and shifted the trajectory of the relationship. I think the most ironic thing I realized after I broke up with him over the phone (because I was worried he’d start begging me to explain every detail of my feelings to him) was that I wrote my senior thesis in college about Manic Pixie Dream Girls and how I relate to being characterized that way by men. And I showed him that project, and he did exactly that to me; misinterpret who I was and who I wanted to become so he could grapple onto my skin, and pull me down to him. It often felt more like I was a prize he won that made him look better as if he was saying to the world, “Look at what I caught.” It was never aggressive or malicious, though, but it certainly wasn’t good. He’d break my things, not out of anger, but simply because he didn’t care enough to pay attention, to be careful, to be considerate. He refused to leave me alone, couldn’t go more than an hour or so without texting me, without checking on me, without being next to me, without touching me, without me touching him, without me doing something for him because he was too anxious to do anything himself. 

At a certain point, it didn’t really matter what I wanted. If I wanted to go to grad school, he got worried that I’d have to move away and I’d break up with him. If I wanted to spend a weekend by myself for once after 2 whole fucking years, he got upset. If I wanted to switch my birth control because the one I’d been on for years made me numb and depressed, he got upset and got worried I would break up with him due to changes in hormones. If I didn’t want to have sex with him, he got upset. Not angry or aggressive though, more like a child I was taking a toy from. I was the toy. I had to be the mother and the whore for him. 

So I broke up with him just before my 25th birthday. I realized it needed to be done, otherwise, I would be trapped in a cycle of unhappiness in a life I couldn’t build for myself. There was a lot I missed out on because of him. And not just because of him, to be fair, but also things I chose not to do because I knew it would make him upset. 

But then I dyed my hair red again. And I felt alive again. 

Red

I’m pretty used to being single. I’ve got a lot more free time now. 

Silver

Something I’m frankly thrilled about is all the little silver hairs I’ve been getting since I graduated college. Unfortunately, they’re mostly on my shaved side, so they’re not often visible, but I still love them.

I’ve been starting to wonder now if I was always meant to thrive in my 40s rather than my 20s. The media I consumed for so long taught me that women are only valuable until they hit about 27 and then they essentially just don’t exist in a positive way. Then you become a crone. I don’t think I’d mind being a crone, though. No one would bother me and I could just live my life without caring about how society or whoever views me, especially not men. I could also just do that now. I definitely wouldn’t mind having silver hair, in fact, I’d love to have fully silver hair. I see lots of women now embracing their premature greys, which maybe aren’t that premature, it’s just that we dye our hair so much so frequently that we don’t really know when we grey these days. If my hair was completely grey or silver right now, I don’t think I’d ever touch it again.

That’s probably not true. Like I said, I can’t stay the same for too long. I am constantly being reborn depending on my emotional state. Maybe now I should just follow my waves as they come instead of pushing against the tide.

Maybe I will go to grad school to stress my hair out enough. Maybe I’ll do the things I’ve always wanted to do, just because I can. 

Hair has always been very important to me. It’s an immediate, easy-to-change expression of myself. I’m thankful that it’s been so resilient through all the changes I’ve gone through and therefore put my hair through.

I’m thankful that I have been resilient enough to change it so many times.