buzz cut

Under these shelter in place orders, I've gotten a lot of satisfaction from rebelling against the patriarchy in small ways. I haven't worn a speck of makeup or hair product since March 12th. I haven't put on a bra, except for the sports variety when I'm getting ready to jog or ride a bike or do yogic inversions. Exactly three times, I've worn pants with proper fasteners. The rest has been an ecstasy of elastic waistbandedness.

At the moment, loosening the reins- or the belt, as it were- may feel a little more accessible, since many people are leaving the house so much less often. For me, though, I wasn't wearing fancy clothes or a lot makeup even before all of this. Living in San Francisco, working as a teacher (in a strong union), and being who I am, getting fancy rarely felt required or enjoyable. But even my jeans and skincare routine got to feeling like a drag sometimes.

If you've also been enjoying some freedom from primping lately, and want to turn your rebellion against conventional beauty standards up a few notches, might I suggest shaving your head? I did about a year ago, and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made.

First off, I want to acknowledge that there was a lot of my privilege involved in this act. I was (and still am) quite healthy, and I had a lot of hair. Plenty of people I know have suffered the trauma of hair loss for various reasons, and I feel incredibly grateful to be able to choose whether or not I have hair. Also, I knew beforehand that, as a white person, though I'd certainly face negative gender-based comments, I'd never be fired or kicked out of school for any hairstyle, even one that some people might consider radically inappropriate. 
 
So. Why on earth did I make this decision in the pre-COVID era? And what have been the perks?

• I'd been wanting to escape the cycle of dyeing my grays. The salon can be a lovely experience, but spending hours and hundreds there every 4-5 weeks became too much for me.
• I'm happy to put fewer chemicals in my body and into the earth and ocean.
• I wanted to feel a bit more unmasked and natural- though I certainly balance this with the tension of embracing how we can transform ourselves again and again, in ways that can make us feel new and different and often more like ourselves. Certainly, there are people and occasions for which growing hair out or putting on makeup can be the most rebellious and freeing acts of all. And sometimes, putting something on can make us feel more natural than taking something off. As Rupaul said when paraphrasing Tede Matthews, "We're all born naked. And the rest is drag." For myself, as a small example of this, despite my current eschewing of bras, proper pants, and makeup, I started enjoying wearing earrings again about two weeks into sheltering in place and working from home. I wasn't born wearing earrings (though almost, since my mom took me to get my ears pierced when I was 13 months old). But I often feel more like myself with them than without.
• For a long time, I've wanted to experience shaving my head at least once.  For about 20 years, in fact. My high school friend Ali shaved her head after we graduated (and looked riot grrl amazing; she’s one of those folks who’d look like a model if she wore a burlap sack). Freshman year of college, I was honored when my friend Kelly (another effortless beauty), who lived down the hall from me, asked me to shave her head. The experience was full of vicarious feelings of rebellion and excitement. I suppose that’s why my friend and neighbor Lindsay agreed so quickly to do it for me last year. Still, we aren’t 19 now, so I think it takes an extra brave soul to come bounding down the stairs- well, elevator- with zero clippers experience, ready to perform a task that could end in bitter tears.
• I was ready to not focus on my appearance so much. The maintenance and head space (you shall never escape puns here) that my hair cost me was even more than the salon bills. My long curly hair felt like my best feature (I kept thinking of Kirsten Dunst’s Amy to Winona Ryder’s Jo in 90’s Little Women: “Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty!”). It felt like my only chance at being at least somewhat attractive according to conventional beauty standards. And that is the mandatory goal, right? My hair seemed to be the thing everyone loved most about my appearance, which made it the thing I had to love most about my appearance. I forgot to ever even think about what I loved most about my appearance. Let alone, what I loved most about myself apart from my appearance. On the other hand, I even felt at times that embracing my naturally curly hair was already a rebellion, since I’d finally learned to stop wishing it was sleek and straight and “well kept” looking. (As you can see, like many people, especially women, my feelings about my appearance are tumultuous, ever-changing, and take up a lot of time and energy.) So, before shaving my head, I said goodbye to any tenuous positive feelings about how I looked. In fact, I expected to hate how it looked afterward, but love how it felt. I ended up loving how it felt and looked, so back to the vanity cycle, I guess. But it did help me focus a LOT less time and energy into my appearance, in addition to the aforementioned money.  
• But back to how it felt- the best part. I experienced a post-head-shave sparkly tactile ASMR wonder I didn't even know I'd been missing. The satisfaction of being on the giving and receiving end of running my fingers over a fuzzy freshly-buzzed head, and the warming sensation on my hands and scalp when my hair follicles snapped back rapidly in prickly-soft succession. When I'd do that after getting out of the shower, a super fine mist would fall over my face in such a way that I could close my eyes and pretend I was on a hike near a waterfall. When I jogged, no sweaty mass on my neck or bobbing ponytail falling out at every step. Nothing to get stuck in my bike helmet- and no high bun to make me not want to eschew a helmet or have to redo my hair when I got to work. No marathon disentangling fests at the end of a windy SF day. Just, freedom. Breezy freedom.

On March 25th of last year, the first day of spring break and the morning after I'd shaved my head, I sprung out of bed at 6AM like a kid on Christmas. When I’d gone to bed after the big chop, I'd been worried that my excitement would dissipate all too soon. I was convinced that when I woke up, in that groggy space where it's hard to know if you're remembering reality or a dream, I'd reach up to touch my head and be flooded with shock, then tears of regret. Instead, I found that I felt even more free than when I laid my bald head down the night before. My skittish nerves were now replaced by that purer joy that comes with the calm of knowing you've made the right decision. I nearly floated from my bed to the bathroom mirror to admire my whole self, the most naked I've been since the day I was born, which was precisely 39 years and 2 months prior. I couldn’t stop grinning.

That kind of calm is pretty rare for me. If you know me-or have read some of my other posts you know that I often continue to doubt decisions I've made, both big and small, sometimes even years after making them. As I discuss in that linked piece, however, so much of the difficulty of decision making is that it involves a permanent loss of some sort. If you choose to do one thing, you give up the chance to do the other. Not so with hair. Chemical treatments mean you can experience having both straight and curly hair in your lifetime. Pink now, green later. If you have no hair, you can join in on the fun for the price of a few wigs. You can try it all. (Well, not all. Note to my fellow white folks: locs are one of the exceptions for us. Just. No.) And even though my certainty is undoubtedly buoyed by the low-stakes impermanence of hairstyle decisions, I want to think that also, just maybe, I'm getting better at this. This process of sitting back into the choices I've made and stretching my legs a bit.