baybeasts

I’m having an issue with my hair. It looks a bit like this:

I’ve been growing it for over two years now. I’m not sure why, exactly. Bean has been too ( I think it is lovely – though she is lucky enough to be beautiful enough to carry off pretty much any hairstyle). This post is very much about me, not her (though I think she feels a bit the same about some of the issues I raise).

I am struggling to know how to frame this post. Sometimes the discomfort with my flowing locks seems to be purely in the realm of fashion crisis, shallow and irritating. It’s fluffy and it annoys me. At these times I think I should just get a different hair cut, maybe sleeker and less layered, or maybe I should learn how to use a hair dryer and the straightening tongs.

But I know that even if I did these things, it wouldn’t solve the sense of discontent I feel every time I look in the mirror. It feels like something much deeper – symbolic of a series of crises of gender and sexual identification, aging, work and my place in the world. And these are what I am struggling to articulate.

It is much harder to take these feelings seriously – sometimes when I flippantly say at work that I want to cut my hair off because I’m tired of not being recognised as a dyke my (uniformly straight) colleagues look at me strangely and say, ‘why does it matter?’ I can never seem to come up with a convincing twenty word answer. This post is my attempt to explain. It will possibly be the final thinking through that will send me to the hairdresser, cherishing the moment when I can say the words ‘cut it all off’. Or maybe by the time I work it all out I will be renewed in my commitment to keeping it long for just a little bit longer.

I had lovely long hair as a young adult – straight and shiny almost down to my waist. Cutting it off when I came out in my early twenties was a revelation. For the first time in my life I liked what I saw in the mirror – I felt like I belonged in my own skin. I felt sexy, spunky, even a bit cool and edgy. These are feelings that I never had as a teenager. I never quite understood how to be a girl – I didn’t know how to make boys (or anyone really) like me, I didn’t know what clothes to wear or how to put on makeup, I always felt awkward and like I was unsuccessfully faking the femininity required of girls in my country town. I never felt like a boy either though – I just felt uncomfortable trying to match up with the gender expectations that I thought were critical to finding love and connection with other people. Sure enough, I was unqualifiedly terrible at picking up! So when I came out as a lesbian I felt like – well, there’s no way to say it that isn’t a cliché – I felt like I’d found myself. I still often felt awkward in my skin and terrible at picking up, but it was much less severe and interspersed with times of feeling decidedly spunky and comfortable (and I did pick up much more successfully!).

Now in my early thirties, I am in a stable, beautiful relationship, and I have taken this opportunity to test a theory that I had – that feeling more comfortable in my skin and cutting my hair were correlated rather than causally related. The real underlying cause, goes my theory, is that I was older, more confident, and trying to pick girls rather than boys (much more within my comfort zone). So I am still older and more confident, and I have picked up my ideal woman so have no need to worry about that anymore – therefore I should be able to grow my hair back to its lovely shiny length and still feel good. And I should do this one last time before it all goes grey.

With the loving support of Bean I struggled through some very dark days of mid-length, uncontrollable hair, and I now have the shiny locks I wanted. I get a lot of praise for them, especially from family members who are thrilled to see me looking like a girl again. But every time I look in the mirror or at a photo it looks kind of wrong. I don’t feel pretty. I have never felt pretty – the best I have ever felt is spunky, and I definitely don’t feel spunky with long, fluffy hair, no matter how good the cut is.

Something I find strange, though, is how strongly it is about the hair, rather than clothes or even weight (though these things also impact on my confidence in presenting myself to the world). With short hair I was still happy to wear skirts, and I still am, though I always feel more comfortable in pants. And while being overweight upset me because it impacted on the clothes I could wear and feel good in, it wasn’t quite the same as the slightly dysphoric feeling I get when I have long hair.

I use the word dysphoric deliberately, because while I don’t feel transgendered in the sense of not wanting to be a woman, I do feel dislocated from the set of expectations and ideals that are generally attached to the concept of ‘woman’ by the first world consumer culture that I occupy. I also feel confused, because there is no clear gender ideal that I aspire to be – I feel a bit like I have to invent it for myself. Actually, thinking about it, I guess I do have an idea of my ideal gender – it is a variant of woman, one that veers towards the androgynous but likes to play with both femininity and masculinity, one that is strong and sexy and a bit spiky. It definitely doesn’t have long, fluffy hair.

Those are the internal reasons. There are external ones as well – a whole realm of desires and confusion about wanting to be recognised as something other than the nice, straight-looking long haired lady I present to the world at the moment. I want my sexuality and my dissatisfaction with the rules of the culture I occupy to be written across my appearance. I don’t feel comfortable in the straight, conservative world I live and work in, and I want it to show, partly out of a sense of defiance, and partly as a system of semaphore, flagging my queerness to those who can read the code, flaunting my difference to those who would otherwise think me one of them.

So why do I bother keeping it long, I hear you ask, dear reader. Well, it was bloody hard growing it out – two years of suffering through every day being a bad hair day. Also, I can see that the hair itself is kind of lovely in its own way, and I would feel sad to lose it even though I can only appreciate its beauty as something not quite attached to me. Once I cut it off I know I will never grow it ever again. And it is actually kind of easy to manage – no product, less frequent haircuts, less trying to come up with a new funky style every few months. I almost never wear it out (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of growing it long, I know), and it is pretty easy to just get up in the morning and tie it back, rather than fiddling with hair product until it is sitting just so.

So for the moment I will keep it, slight sense of hair dysphoria and all. I’ll try and get a sleeker, less fluffy haircut. And one day, one glorious day, I will cut it all off and feel like myself again.