Growing up, I spent most of my time at the hair salon where my mom worked. Doing laundry, running errands, gossiping with forty-year-old women… these were the activities of my youth. My life was marked by constant change- though this was manifest in the hairdos of the elderly women who wandered in looking for a new way to style their fading hair.
As I got older, my time spent at the salon took its toll; my hair became my instrument for unconsciously conveying whatever phase I was experiencing. At twelve, I chopped off my long mane of messy blond curls and grew out the bangs I had deemed childish. When thirteen rolled around, I dyed my hair magenta, to match my favorite t-shirt. At fourteen, my hair changed color monthly, moving between red, brown, and blond (which, because of the other colors, ended up being more of a yellow).
And so it went, on into high school, as my hairstyle became a tightly-coiled bun positioned awkwardly on my head. I was shy; I did not hide behind my hair- I hid my hair behind me. I envied the girls with the long, shiny tresses, their hair spilling onto the desk behind them and the sweet smell of hair products lingering long after their presence.
I refused to leave my house with my hair down. It did not look like the beautiful styles of the popular girls; instead, my hair, when worn down, more closely resembled the tattered brooms used by the janitors.
I finally wore my hair long after I decided to put it into dreadlocks during my senior year of high school, much to the dismay of my mother and art teacher. For the first three months, my dreads looked (and smelled) as though it’d been made the nest of a host of small animals. Later, though, they grew more uniform and I learned how to care for them.
To celebrate their half-birthday, I dyed my dreads lime-green and electric blue. I had now become the ‘hippie’ of my high school; still quiet, I now had an image that my peers viewed as legitimate. I happily bought into it… or maybe, I had finally found a way of expressing who I really was. Either way, I embraced my inner-hippie, wearing hand-painted jeans to school and buying Grateful Dead albums. I had finally found the image I so badly desired throughout my adolescence.
When I graduated high school, I was still the hippie. That summer was spent wandering barefoot, rejecting my car in favor of taking the bus to the outdoor ‘open mic’ nights. I came to college with a set of door beads and year-old dreadlocks, excited and nervous to enter a world where I knew this image would have to be substantiated with ‘who I read’ and what I wrote.
My hair changes have slowed down now, marked only by a change from my high-school dreadlocks to normal hair, and back to dreadlocks. I shaved my head last November, as a final farewell to my attachment to hairstyle; with or without hair, I’m still who I am. There’s no changing that.
