What Makes You Beautiful (or, Hair Angst)

My crit-group partner and bearer of awesomely curly hair, Ghenet, has a YA Cafe post up today about teens and body image. More specifically, about her love-hate relationship with her curls. Which was a well-timed read for me (thanks Ghenet!) because yesterday I chopped my hair off.



I have a love-hate relationship with my hair too. Maybe it's a curly-haired-person thing? Basically, when I was little, I haaaated it. My mom has enviable stick-straight hair, so she didn't really understand how to work curls (i.e. don't brush them when they're dry, because it REALLY HURTS and turns you into a Hermione-frizz-head. Also, don't cut them super-short or they become a triangle).

(i mean, just look how angry i was about it! ... hmm.)

In my early teenage years, this continued to cause angst. Why couldn't my hair just be straight like everyone else's? And behave. And not look so WEIRD. BLAH.






But after my teen years, as I grew it longer, and longer, and longer, I came to love the curls. Yes, it was an unruly mess. At its longest, it would snatch glasses off the faces of passersby. Get stuck on doorknobs and nearly rip out my scalp. In one particularly memorable moment, my hair got caught on the buttons of some guy walking past me in the Penguins hockey stadium. My brother had to chase him down while I staggered along, dragged by the scalp, to tell him that his sister was attached to his coat.



When I finally got hired for a Real Job in an Office Where You Should Probably Not Look Like a Hippy, I cut it to around shoulder length, with layers (and posted about it! sensing a theme here...). It grew back over the last couple years, and something strange happened.









My hair wasn't exactly straight. That will probably never happen. But it was definitely not as curly. In fact, most of the time, it was wavy.



Suddenly I missed that hair I'd hated so much and fought with while growing up. And after growing up. Was this karmic retribution? Had I complained one too many times about the curls? It felt like losing part of my identity. Something that defined me -- people recognized my hair. Now what would they recognize?

Yesterday, I went into the salon and told them I wanted to donate to Locks of Love. I did not know how many inches minimum you needed to donate. it was more than I expected. But I asked the stylist to do it anyway. And it's funny -- after he cut the first length off, as he was further chopping and styling my remaining locks, watching it poof higher and higher while he brushed, he said, "You know, you have such beautiful curls."

So maybe it's not as curly as it used to be. Maybe it still looks wavy to me in the mirror. Maybe if it was still as curly as it used to be, I'd be complaining about that instead. But I did have to laugh at my teenaged self,* as I held the braid that used to be 10 inches of my hair.

There are so many worse problems to have than curly/wavy/straight hair. Some people don't have any hair at all. Some people's hair loss is the least of their problems. So here's hoping that this small tail of not-quite-curly kind-of-wavy hair will make someone else feel a little bit more confident. Or better yet, here's hoping that whoever it goes to doesn't need that confidence boost, because they already know they're awesome, no matter what's on their head.

And if you haven't read Ghenet's post today, you really should hop over there. It's a great essay!

* Okay, and myself, like, yesterday morning. Let's face it, the angst doesn't stop when you hit 20. *optimism*