The Lifetouch representative helping with school picture day during seventh grade had poor handwriting. When I received my packet of pictures, the name on the envelope was, "May Vale". I was horrified, and I quickly became the victim of endless ridicule by the other students in my carpool. The only way to ensure that name didn't make it into the yearbook was to have my picture retaken on make-up picture day, checking that they clearly and correctly wrote down my name this time. The new photo to be taken, which would supersede my original one, was incidental, which was a shame, because I really liked my original photo.
One morning after showering, I tried parting my hair down the middle. Whoa, I thought as I looked at myself in the mirror, look how handsome I am! I kept the look and emerged confidently from the bathroom. When my older brother spotted me, he proceeded to criticize my hairstyle. I can't remember if the criticism was that only girls part their hair in the middle, or that I looked incredibly dorky.
In spite of my older brother's derision, I decided to part my hair down the middle for the make-up picture. I felt confident in my decision to do so until I got the new picture back a few weeks later. Objectively, the picture was fine--albeit not as good as my original photo--but every time I looked at it, I could not push what my older brother had said about my hair out of my mind. I became ashamed of that photo.
Later that year was when the texture of my hair thickened, and it started to get curly. If it was windy--or, more commonly, after I ran the mile during morning P.E.--the individual hairs within a lock would separate from each other, puffing outward. Most people want their hair to have more volume; I had extra volume I wished I could give away. It became difficult to tame and for me to keep a clean-cut appearance.
I no longer considered getting a buzz cut an option, even though I had done so every spring or summer prior. Last year, in sixth grade, my best friend and I happened to get buzz cuts around the same time. Since we were always together, many of my classmates had assumed we did it together. At the eighth grade softball game, we sat together in the front of the bleachers; from the back of the bleachers, an eighth grader called to us, "Hey bald-headed twins, move!" I heard laughter behind me and some slight muttering about us being gay. That was the last time I got a buzz cut.
Instead, I grew my hair out. My older brother encouraged me to do so, and it was consistent with the classic rock music phase I was in. I had progressed through puberty enough such that I was less afraid of being perceived as a girl, as had happened with my younger brother when he grew his hair out. If my hair was going to be difficult to tame anyway, I might as well have it be long.
This was when my fate was sealed that I would forever be a shower-in-the-morning person, rather than a shower-at-night person--and I would have to shower daily. Showering in the morning was essential to rein in my hair's volume to something resembling a normal aesthetic. Showering in the morning became necessary to exert over it whatever little control I could muster.
And yet expressing why I needed to shower in the morning was out of the question from both a spiritual standpoint and a gendered standpoint. Spiritually, the messaging I was served was that I was not supposed to be so fixated on my physical appearance; that was vanity. "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). By caring about how I looked, I was being self-centered rather than Jesus-centered, which was sinful. And anyway, only women and girls cared about how they looked. Men and boys were not supposed to care. The boys and men from church groups with whom I went on camping trips could all get by without having to shower daily. My need for a daily morning shower undercut my masculinity.
My middle school long hair lasted less than a year. I chose to attend the Christian high school at which my brother was enrolled, which legislated that a male student's hair could not extend past his eyebrows, past his ear lobes, or past the back of his shirt collar. After my long locks were chopped, I learned just how curly my hair had become over the previous 18 months. Waves, tight curls, and tiny ringlets distributed non-uniformly made my inch-and-a-half long hair atop my head look only half an inch long in some places. The overlapping curls and waves made my hair puff outward and upward, and wind or rain could make it double in size.
Visor beanies were in fashion at that time, and I quickly adopted them as my signature look at the outset of high school. I had so much anxiety about how my hair looked at any given moment and near-constant frustration that it would not behave the way I wanted it to, so I carried a visor beanie with me almost wherever I went in case of hair emergencies. If my hair poofed up, I could wear the beanie for a while in hopes that the beanie fabric's tensile strength would flatten and smooth my hair out. Best of all, I could use a beanie for mornings when my access to a shower was restricted.
Throughout high school, I visited barber shops as infrequently as I could manage. It seemed no matter what I asked the barber to do, I always walked away with a haircut much shorter than I had in mind. The curls made it appear even shorter than it was, accompanied by several lone wavy strands snaking upward from my scalp. After the first few haircuts, I chalked it up to the barbers' faults. That this outcome occurred every time I visited a barber eroded this assertion's veracity.
So I began taking more drastic measures. During my sophomore year, I did not rinse out my conditioner after application in the shower, which enabled me to keep the hair on the top of my head pasted down and soft in texture once it dried. Several girl friends repeatedly told me that they wanted my hair, to which I sardonically responded, "No, you don't," while other girl friends were disappointed in my flat hairstyle choice, urging me to "embrace the curl!" Everyone seemed to have an opinion on my hair, while I was the one who had to actually reckon with possessing a hair type and texture that I did not want.
During one of the summers in which I was a junior counselor at a Christian camping organization, the Camp Director chastised me on the third day of pre-camp training that my morning shower was an imposition on everyone else. He sternly told me that he expected everyone to be present for the start of breakfast, which I had missed the previous two days for my shower. He deemed me selfish for choosing to shower at that time and for using up the cabin's limited hot water supply. I was ashamed. I did not bother explaining to him my reasoning for needing to shower first thing in the morning, because I knew that in his eyes, the need to feel okay about my appearance would not be a rational justification. How I felt about my appearance was irrelevant to him.
Tired of bad haircuts, I let my hair grow a bit longer at the beginning of my junior year. By September, I knew my hair had crossed the thresholds outlined in the student handbook--my hair extended past my eyebrows at times, depending on how tight my curls were that day--but I opted to wait until a teacher asked me to cut it. Surprisingly, several additional weeks passed without a teacher reprimand.
One day in October, two classmates in my physics class and I were invited to a special lunchtime assembly about an undisclosed subject. We were an odd combination of bedfellows with no overlapping social or academic characteristics. It turned out our common trait was that the three of us--plus about 40 other boys across all classes--had been identified by our teachers as being out of compliance with the school's hair length rules. During the special lunch assembly, the 40 or so boys who had been summoned, myself included, were handed a comb and then one by one forced to sit in a chair in front of each other while the Principal, Vice Principal, and a Bible teacher issued dispositions about exactly how we needed to get our hair cut within the next week. As we left the classroom in which the assembly was held, dozens of curious students waiting outside eager to know what the special assembly was about swarmed us asking for details.
That afternoon, I posted a Facebook Note describing the details of the incident and how humiliated I felt by it. The responses I received from fellow students and recent alumni generally fell into two camps: those sympathetic to the dehumanizing experience I endured ("That's fucked up"), or those who were apologists for the way the school handled it ("Well, you agreed to abide by these rules, and the Bible says you should obey authority"). The school staff and faculty also got involved, insidiously making it my fault for not expressing my anger to them in a biblical way as outlined in Matthew 18.
In follow-up conversations with school faculty, they said they might be willing to consider changing the hair rules if I presented them with a compelling case. Rather than seeking to understand my perspective--for instance, why short hair may not be ideal for my hair type--the onus was completely on me to justify why I did not want my hair short. The hair rules as they stood were the presumed default; the faculty did not reflect after the fact that perhaps the rules were flawed to begin with.
I got my hair cut the day after the assembly. And that was when I started the cheeky practice of hanging a sarcastic paper sign around my neck the day after I received a haircut:
DAILY SPECIAL
Handshakes.....................................................FREE
High-fives.......................................................FREE
Hugs.............................................................FREE
Asking about school..........................................$5.00
Asking about my day..........................................$5.00
Asking about my hair........................................$10.00
Commenting on my hair....................................$20.00
My mother was never pleased any time I fashioned one of these signs. "You know this is just going to draw more attention to your hair, right?"
In spite of my disdain for my hair, the next year, I quietly hoped that I would be nominated for the "Best Hair" senior class award. My hair was nothing if not unique, and I had certainly made quite the ruckus following the hair assembly. Maybe this would be a way for my hair to redeem itself, to provide some positive contribution to my life, trivial as it might be. But the award went to a popular, pretty boy with stylish hair.
I visited my friend's mother, a stylist, for the last haircut I received in high school in January of my senior year shortly after my birthday. Despite my high expectations for her to be able to give me a short hairstyle that worked with my hair type, her haircut turned out exactly like all of my previous ones. Worst of all, her $42 haircut was at least twice as expensive as anywhere else I had gone. I handed her the three $20 bills I had on me, but she did not open the register to make change. She sent me home with a bottle of expensive conditioner that my friend, her daughter, used. I rationalized the transaction by assuming the change I did not receive had constituted her tip plus the conditioner, even though I did not ask for the conditioner. The following morning at school, my friend, her daughter, handed me $18, saying that I overpaid, and that her mom gave me the conditioner as a birthday gift. It was extremely odd.
That was the last haircut I had for five and a half years. I graduated from the hair length rules at my high school into a world where I could choose my hair length. I could grow it long enough such that it could weigh itself down--maybe I would no longer have to worry about the wind expanding it into a "jew-fro".
Around this time, Lady Gaga released Born this Way. In the song "Hair", Gaga asserts that hair is "all the glory that I bear", is an essential part of one's identity, is inextricable from the self--"I am my hair". As the song's play count kept increasing in my iTunes library, I found myself of two minds about the song: on the one hand, I found the equation of hair with identity reductive; yet I also understood the pain of not being able to present my hair how I wanted. I analogized Gaga's relationship with her mother in the song, who cut her hair as punishment, to my high school, whose rules required me to cut my hair lest I face punishment.
Despite my eye-rolling at the teenage subject matter of the song, it had staying power with me during my first few months of college. I found the pre-chorus line, "I just wanna be myself and I want you to love me for who I am," particularly resonant as I struggled to make new friends. On a day of especially strong feelings of loneliness, I posted that lyric as my Facebook status. Ignorant of the deep anguish that prompted that post, a friend commented: "Is it bad that I almost laughed out loud at this?"
I became friends with Nina, a senior, at my new college church group. One day, I leafed through her Facebook profile pictures, and I came across a photo of her with a shaved head dated about a year and a half prior. The photo was captioned, "why I did it," followed by a link. The link was a video of her explaining that her life had always been a "normal, comfortable, middle-class, white" life, and that it was unfair that she received special treatment because she possessed these outwardly visible characteristics. To help her understand what others experienced in being judged for their appearances, she decided to shave her head. A timelapse showed her undergoing the process, her brother in charge of the clippers.
The comments section was overwhelmingly positive, lauding Nina for her courage. At least two comments included the phrase, "You are not your hair!" It was an interesting juxtaposition to encounter that exact phrasing at the same time that Gaga's lyric, "I am my hair!" bounced around in my head. Who was right? I pondered.
In retrospect, Nina's act was a performative flavor of SJWism that was more socially acceptable in the early 2010s but probably would not be viewed favorably nowadays. All photos of Nina from that timeframe appear to have since been deleted from her Facebook profile.
All throughout undergraduate and grad school, I kept growing my hair. I gained a modicum of control back when it became long enough to tie back into a ponytail. I regularly wore my hair in a bun for at least two years before the "man bun" craze swept the internet. Every three months or so, I very imprecisely trimmed about an inch off to mitigate split ends, or so I was instructed to do--I never actually encountered any. Perhaps the sole benefit of curly hair that I found was that the waves completely hid my jagged trimming jobs.
The drawbacks of my long hair, however, were numerous, not least of which was the sheer number of times I was called, "Blond Jesus", or "Weird Al". Those occurrences more than anything else made me want to cut it all off. But I remembered how miserable short hair had made me feel about my appearance in high school. I could not risk that again. So I kept growing.
I cut it off a few days before I began my first full-time job after grad school. Doing so was not a prerequisite for the job; I had interviewed with the man bun and still received an offer. I simply decided it was time for a new era. I suppose by that point, I was ready to accept that my short hair might still have an awful texture. But, to my delight, the hair that was left had smoothed out quite a bit. Nowadays, people are surprised when I tell them my hair is (was?) curly.I still get a lot of questions asking, "Why did you grow it out?" or "Why did you cut it off?" I wish I had more elegant answers than the truth. I grew it out because I hated the look and texture of my short hair; it truly made me feel ugly. And I cut it off because I decided I was done having long hair; I simply felt like it.
And maybe I don't need to assign any more meaning to it than that.
