It's hairy out there

Heads up, folks. This is another blog on a very seemingly trivial subject. Hair.  But hey—I’m finally writing again, and that’s half the battle!

I’ve had an interesting relationship with my hair as far back as I can remember. Some of it was just the normal pains of childhood, and some of it was… a bit extra. Pumpkin spice latte, glitter tights extra, if you will.

As a child I was blonde. Not platinum levels, to be sure, but solidly blonde. Up until a certain age, anyway. I took some measure of pride in being the only blonde in a family of brunettes. I suppose I felt it somehow made me special (with the implication that I felt quite unspecial with every other aspect of my life).

After one disastrously short hair cut as a 7 year old, I became quite insistent on growing and keeping my hair long. It may have been a reaction to being mistaken for a boy for an entire school year. I was bamboozled into the chop with the name “pixie”, which I associated with Lady Lovely Locks. No one explained it meant “short”. To be fair, my mom probably chopped it all off because I was terrible about brushing it as a 7 year old, and she was just doing what she had to do. But yeah, needless to say, that pixie cut completely ruined the fantasy in my 7 year old brain of being Lady Lovely Locks.

Things evened out for a few years, until I was 13. At this point I’d realized my hair was slowly darkening. Oh no! I might wind up looking like everyone else, and the blonde was the only thing that made me different (Hello, poor self-esteem. I see you’re still here). Enter sun-in. Bright blonde again. And then, for my 14th birthday, enter real hair dye. Just like the adults use — extra special! Name the shade of blonde, and I did it. I also experimented with copper and strawberry shades, but never had enough courage to keep them, though I secretly loved them a ton (even the traffic cone orange incident). And, I continued to grow my hair longer.

But, by my senior year in high school, I’d gotten it into my head that I would be more adult and mature if I 1) cut my hair to my shoulders and 2) dyed it brown. I’m not sure why I thought that, but I did, and so that’s exactly what I did. I left my hair alone for the entire senior year, and then the 6 months after, leading up to AF basic training. It grew quickly, but I left the dye alone (man, for the hair growth speed of my youth!)

Peer pressure and TI pressure convinced me to chop my mid-back length hair to a military page cut. And then I spent a few years slowly growing it back out again. At my tech school, I started using sun-in again. At my first duty station, I started dying my hair various shades of dark red, occasionally interspersed with brighter coppers (but always returning to the darker shades). Sometimes I’d let the dye fade out entirely and be left with a weird non-color. Not blonde, not brown. That shade only lasted until the next color refresh back to some form of auburn. When a dude suggested I go blonde, I laughed and just shook my head. I liked my red, and my color was for me, not anyone else.

By the time I was stationed in Japan, I was on my way to hip length hair (which I absolutely loved). I also discovered for the first time that henna could be used as a hair dye (I’d been slowly getting more and more sensitive to chemical dyes over the years and worried about needing to quit coloring).

This amazing powdered herb was fantastic: it was healthy for my hair and gave me the red tones I adored. I was completely in love with the henna. Until I wasn’t. I think this was when I first pinpointed being influenced by outside opinions on whether or not I felt my hair color was “good enough”. I was about 26 at this point. Someone I was dating at the time started dropping a lot of comments about how much he liked blonde hair better. And I was a mess of insecurities by that point when it came to my personal life and especially my appearance. So, I spent a long time trying to lighten my hair, only to discover how very permanent henna was.

Next came all the hair chopping, to deal with damage from failed attempts at bleach (and more comments about how ugly the short hair looked). While I actually enjoyed the shorter hair, I missed the length, and the negative comments from that same person were crushing. I probably in total spent about 6 years completely mucking with my hair in an attempt to make it “good enough” to please the person I was dating, later married to, then divorced (note: all active attempts to please said person had ended probably 6 months leading up to the divorce finalization).

And ever since, I’ve been stuck in a weird rapidly spiraling cycle of constant hair color change and then growing out and chopping my hair (due to excessive damage from cycling through hair colors faster than I had prior to the 26 year old version of me). And, continuing to aggravate my skin, because it’s not like those chemical sensitivities ever went away. All seeking some nebulous sense of external approval and validation from… who? Huh. Well, damn.

I think what I’ve been dealing with is a bit of dysmorphia where it comes to my hair—emotional damage from a long dead relationship that became this monstrous metaphorical scar. I kept picking at the scar, having forgotten where the wound initially came from. In my mind, my hair was never, ever good enough, even though literally the only person who ever convinced me of that is someone I haven’t seen or heard from since I divorced him. Realizing that was… a surreal feeling. I’m still processing it, but I think it’s going to sink in.

Also, therapy works, ya’ll. Not ashamed to tell folks that I talk to a therapist regularly these days. It’s helping me get to the core of what drives some of the behaviors I hate, yet keep wallowing in.

So next up in such a trivial thing as hair: I’m going to try to break the cycle of damage-chop-damage-chop. Now that I understand a bit better where all that excessive insecurity first came from, I’m going to remind myself that literally no one in my life today would ever be cruel enough to belittle me to the point of developing a psychosis about a physical feature (because the people in my life now are all pretty awesome, kind-hearted people). My partner is an amazing man, and despite all my whacky hair cycles that he’s been witness to in the last 5 years, he’s never once told me I’m ugly or gross or not good enough. Which means I’m merely being haunted by the ghost of an awful relationship that I thought I’d recovered from years ago.

And what do we do with malicious hauntings? Hint: we do NOT invite the poltergeist to stay for tea (ghosts are notorious tea thieves anyway). We grab a bag of salt and a smudge stick, and we tell that unwanted ghost to GTFO.

Also, we maybe go buy some henna and plan for a nice evening spent reclaiming pieces of ourselves that we’ve missed, while reminding ourselves that if we like something, that is the “good enough” measurement.

Or, maybe we just go have a cup of chai and blog about our inner mental workings. Either works, really.