With Great Haircuts Comes Great Responsibility

 

No, this is not gonna be about the fastidious use of hair products which, counterintuitively, only grows more so when your locks get pruned at the parlor. This is about me, so both of us can count on one sure thing before I get right to it: it’s gonna be low on narcissism and high on that special brand of endorphins which come with self-deprecation – I’ve got the latter, in spades, and a fresh half-baked theory about how it connects to, of all things, the length of my hair.

You see, after a year and a half of boycotting that unwritten rule, obeyed by all women, to pay a monthly visit (and fee) to the scissors & comb crowd, a month or so ago I did end up taking that plunge, toeing that line. On a whim, following a bad run of things, or just ‘cause I felt like a change – what matters isn’t why I got my hair cut, but what revelations that nip-’n-tuck brought. My observations were as follows:

1. when you wear your hair long, you can pass for a high school teen, which, especially if you sport the scowl and the personal-space hunchback to go with the lanky locks, can make you invisible. Ok, maybe not as far as everyone else on the subway with you is concerned, but sometimes it’s enough to make pretend, for your own peace of mind, that when hair obstructs your field of vision, it doubles as invisibility cloak. And for some reason, putting my headphones on, on my way to work, would have the instantaneous effect of pushing back the world into my own private music video, into un-reality; that’s on the blink now that my scowl has to fend for itself.
2. that’s another thing right there: who knew a swanky hair cut could straighten your spine up, propping it like Prîslea’s sharp-spear-sticks-whatever, lest u should fall back on that nasty little habit of giving the world the mental finger… Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I suddenly give a rat’s ass about how my fellow subway-riders see me or look/glare at me, on a conscious level at least that’s not likely to happen since my blank stare usually latches on to some non-human bit of subway fixtures – subconsciously, another kettle of fish altogether: in that, I might give, if not a fully-grown rat’s ass, a tiny little mouse’s ass for sure. Thanks to the hair cut, I’m out in the open and visibility breeds vulnerability.
3. I know that staying in the green zone of conscious reaction is only scratching the surface of the alterations in my psycho make-up after HC-Day: digging further, I ended up with another mental tapeworm, whose larvae haven’t yet hatched per se, but here’s what I have so far. If you look in the mirror – and you do, fess up – you’ll eventually go from self-scrutiny to not really seeing yourself, your physical self, at all (or that might just happen when low self-esteem meshes with depression?), which in some twisted knock-on way builds a sturdier picture of yourself, imprinted on every neuron, every cell of your being. This image, sensitive not visual, has nothing to do with standardized beauty, it’s an incipient image, felt rather than represented. Here’s a for instance: I’d walk down the street, a gust of wind would blow my hair out of place, all over the place, mixing it up with my lashes and the chords of my headphones – and off the bat I’d get a flashback of waking up in the morning all unkempt, a warm memory of disentangling my hair from my face to look the new day in the white of its eyes, ultimately summed up to well-being and coziness with the Self. Why would you go and mess with that sort of easiness, that flow and interconnectedness between interior and exterior? I said I wouldn’t go into the whys, and I won’t. But when I DID cut that circuit, by cutting some of my hair, some of what made me the whole I was comfortable with – the wear and tear of high-school-me and airy-fairy-me got replaced with an unfamiliar freshness which does, indeed, have the charm of malleable novelty going for it. In retrospect, however, this slight toehold of a sway it grabbed my imagination with can’t, as yet, replace the serenity of those bygone days. Accustoming oneself to change is handier than adapting to the newer state of affairs, which would imply my not looking in the first shop window after some spring draft ruffles my hair.

…TMI for 2A.M., when all I actually wanted to convey is how I miss my shambolic shock o’ hair :X

~ by vintagenoisenik on April 23, 2009.