Knowing My Own Head

I am about to cut my own bangs for the first time in my life.

I have never had bangs. And I can feel, through some frequency I cannot name, every person who has ever identified as a woman recoiling in sympathetic horror at that sentence. The warnings are already arriving in your head on my behalf. Don't do it. You'll regret it. Go to a professional. Do you know what you're doing? Strangely, I'm not recoiling. I definitely was, don't get me wrong. I stood in front of the mirror with scissors for a solid few minutes doing absolutely nothing, which is its own kind of information. But somewhere in that stillness something shifted, and I realized this isn't really about my hair.

I've been growing out my grey for a while now. It wasn't a dramatic decision. There was no ceremonial last appointment, no manifesto or declaration. It was more like a quiet stopping. A putting down of something I'd been carrying so long I'd forgotten it had weight. It was something I absentmindedly set down and when I realized it, I didn’t feel like picking it up again.

Some mornings I catch myself in the mirror and I cringe; I can be honest about that. There's a reflexive little flinch before I remember that I chose this, that I like this, that this is mine. The cringe isn't vanity, exactly. Or anyway it's not only that. It's something more like a recording playing back. It’s the echo of a standard I absorbed so early and so completely that it still fires before I can intercept it.

That reflex is data. It tells me exactly what I was taught to believe about what a woman my age is supposed to look like. The fact that I can now watch it happen without obeying it, well, that's the work. That's what I mean when I say diagnosis comes before everything else. You can't change what you can't see.

There's a particular strain of feminist thinking about women and hair that I want to be careful around. It goes like this: the salon is a site of capitalist extraction, beauty standards are tools of control, the woman who colors her grey is participating in her own oppression. I don't fully buy it. Or rather, I think it's sometimes true and often unkind. And frequently it’s just the same pill in a different flavor.  Because I know women who love going to the salon. Not despite their politics but entirely separate from them. Women who sit in that chair and exhale for the first time all week. They are touched with attention and skill and no need attached to it whatsoever. People who spend their days being needed, reached for, climbed on, asked of, for whom being tended to by another person is not false consciousness but genuine nourishment.

The hidden requirement I want to name is not you must stop coloring your hair. It's the unarticulated pressure in either direction, the reflex that colors without asking whether it wants to, and the judgment that shames the woman who colors because she loves it. The requirement hiding underneath both is the same one: that a woman's relationship to her own appearance should be managed, optimized, explained, defended. That it should mean something legible to everyone else. What if it's just hers. For some women that question has never been simple. For me, I'm only just learning to ask it

I think about what it means, for some of us, that we know very little about our own hair. We know what products we use or what our stylist recommends. We know what it looks like when someone else has finished with it. But the actual texture of it, the growth patterns, the way it moves when left entirely to itself, that knowledge often lives with strangers who see us twice a year for forty-five minutes. 

There's something about slowly, imperfectly learning to cut your own hair with full accountability for the results. Something that feels like reclaiming a kind of literacy. Not because the salon is bad. Because knowing your own head is good. Knowing you is good. And I think I am only just beginning to understand what it means to claim things as mine.

My mother cut my hair first and then the stylists. Always other hands doing the excavating, deciding what to reveal, what to shape, what to leave. I never thought to question it. When you’re being tended to you just sit and trust the hands. There is love in that, and, I'm realizing, a kind of long slow abdication.

So here I am digging. Still cutting away at what accumulated to find out who was always underneath. I'm just the one holding the scissors now. Mine is a word I am learning to use again. My grey. My cringe. My choice to stop coloring and my choice not to explain it. And today, my hair, my scissors, my outcome either way. Good or bad, fixable or not, this is a decision I made with my own hands and cannot give back. There is something clarifying about that kind of irreversibility. Most of the things we're most afraid of claiming carry that same quality, once you say it, once you do it, you are accountable to it. The outcome is yours.

I used to think that was the frightening part. But the greyer my hair gets, the more I think it's the point.

The scissors are in my hand. I've watched the tutorials. I know the technique: cut dry (curly-girl here), point-cut upward, go longer than you think. I'm going to do it. Not because it's radical. Not to prove anything. But because I want to know my own head well enough to trust my own hands on it. Because the grey is mine. Because the cringe and the choosing are both mine. Because the woman in my mirror flinches and then she does it anyway. She’s running her own show. And she’s doing a pretty good job.

And now you’ll have to excuse me while I go buy some really lovely hair clips to use while my bangs grow out.