On haircuts

Before we begin: What follows is a rather silly meditation on hair, but I don’t even want to get there before I drag our attention to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and unlawful occupation of Palestine. Israel murders people every day. Our governments, corporations and dollars are complicit. I hope you’ll join me in continuing to speak out, to donate E-Sims, to wear your Palestine pin/ Keffiyeh to work, keep your Free Palestine posters visible and public, support the BDS boycott, share news from Palestine and whatever else you can do. Free Palestine, all day every day.

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There’s an iconic scene in the second season of Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Fleabag where Claire, Fleabag’s sister, gets a terrible haircut . Said haircut causes Fleabag to go charging into the hair salon to insist on a refund on behalf of her sister. When the hairdresser (played by Kadiff Kirwan, who I adore) splutters “Hair isn’t everything!” Fleabag responds without missing a beat, “Hair is everything! We wish it wasn’t so we could actually think about something else occasionally, but it is.”

The first time I saw this exchange, something inside of me stood up from its seat and cheered. Finally! Someone says what I’ve always thought! For as long as I can remember, haircuts have taken up a huge amount of psychic space in my life. I plan them, I obsess over them, I look forward to them and I dread them. My first poetry chapbook was even titled haircut poems, structured around the meaning assigned to a haircut. Obviously hair isn’t actually everything, but it is everything in a specific, self obsessed context. Which is all to say, hi everyone, welcome to my Substack, I’ve scheduled a haircut for Friday so today we’re talking about hair.

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Hair was one of the first things about myself I didn’t like. I was born with a head of tight curls, which in a place like the U.S. might have been unremarkable but in Japan, where everyone seemed to have thick, straight hair, my corkscrew head was odd and different. I can remember being four and feeling bad about my hair, looking at it in mirrors and wishing it was long, straight, and glossy. At five, my mother took me to see Titanic in theaters and one of the things that remained with me, no doubt stoking my deep and abiding love for the film, was Kate Winslet’s head of unruly red ringlets. I adored Rose and wanted to be her. If she had curly hair, then perhaps curly hair was a good thing?

But alas! Seemingly overnight, my hair texture changed. It felt like a conspiracy, like the world knew I had just decided I liked my curly hair and so, to punish me or keep me on my toes, it gave me a head of lank in-between hair that curled on hot days, but otherwise lived in a limp state of half-hearted waves. (More likely is that my hair simply grew longer and the curls could no longer tolerate the weight. I was a dramatic kid, ok?)

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My next hair memory is also tied to movies, this time Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime or Princess Mononoke. We had already moved to the U.S. by then but religiously only got our hair cut on our semi-annual trips back to Japan. Because we only got haircuts on these trips over summer break, I would spend all year thinking about it. It was the summer before fourth grade. We’d lived in the States for three years. I decided I was sick of being friendless and shy, the kind of girl who stuck her head into backpacks to avoid watching her crush open his secret admirer valentine written by yours truly. I wanted to be bold, brash, strong. I wanted to run fast, and laugh loud. I wanted to stop shrinking. Above all, I wanted to be like San.

San, a princess raised by wolves; fearless; introduced to us in a frame where her mouth is full of blood, earrings glinting; wild and dangerous. I would never be able to scale a fence with my hands or ride a giant white wolf who called itself my mother but at the very least I could have hair like her.

When the much anticipated hair appointment arrived, I told the hairdresser I wanted short hair, like San’s. She knew who I was taking about right away. It was the first time I ever asked for a short haircut. As my long hair fell away, it felt like other things—shame, embarassment, an affected and adopted shyness—fell away too. Walking out of the salon, I remember crossing an elevated sidewalk. It was so bright in Hoshigaoka that day, a detail I committed to memory because it twinned how I felt; bright, floating, vivacious. One of my best haircuts to date.

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And then, there were the bad haircuts. There was sixth grade when I accidentally shaved off my eyebrows and my mom gave me panic bangs, blunt, heavy, unstyled, like a shelf of hair across my face. There was another year where I decided to get highlights in an attempt to be “hot” and ended up with large chunks of unblended blonde. In high school, I wanted to cement my status as a quirky art girl and got emo sideways bangs that left my forehead pockmarked and pimply. The summer before college I cut my hair short again, but in an expensive salon in Chicago that catered to women twenty years older than me, so I ended up with a haircut meant for a suburban mom with a minivan. The summer after college ended, desperately lonely and lost, I attempted a short ombre which looked like my disaster highlights, only pointed in a different direction. In New York, a Russian woman told me pointedly she wouldn’t cut my hair past my shoulders because my neck was too thick. And in Boston, I reprised the bangs, only to find yet again that I couldn’t pull them off.

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Because I am nosy / a Gemini/ always curious about other people’s lives, one of my favorite questions to ask professionals is if there is something a customer will ask for that they immediately judge. A florist told me she judges people who want hydrangeas in flower arches as unreasonable and out of touch—hydrangeas are too delicate to withstand a long time without water. A drunken wedding planner told me she hates cake smashes. Once, a chef bemoaned the prevalence of bacon in everything. The first time I met Zachary, who now cuts my hair, I asked them this same question. What’s a thing customers ask for that they immediately judge?

Zachary was quiet at first, then answered “Well, nothing really. But I guess whenever people come here and are showing me pictures of haircuts they want, I try to understand first what it is the haircut means to them and what they’re trying to get out of it. And then I try to figure out how to give them that feeling in a way that will suit their hair texture and face, even if it isn’t exactly what is in the photograph.” Immediately I felt like a total jerk for wanting to hear dishy gossip about bad customers, while also completely won over by the perceptive, compassionate stance that Zachary took toward their customers.

I’m a loyal Zachary customer now. Though I’ve never before been someone who requests a hair stylist, now I will wait months for their schedule to open. Zachary, with their witchy crystals and favorite films and kind voice, telling me I look like one of their cousins (they are also half Japanese). A hair stylist who outwardly talks about all the importance and meaning we can give to our hair.

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These days, my haircut dilemma always boils down to one question: cut it all or cut it a little? In other words: drama or reserve? I tend to hit the same narrative beats over and over. I cut my hair as short as I’m willing to go (two years ago December was the shortest I’ve ever cut it, face framing layers with a back so short my neck was shaved). I feel a mix of satisfaction and regret. I tell myself it doesn’t matter because now I will grow my hair out and I will enjoy the long hair. My hair grows. I get sick of it. I dream of cutting it all off again. I get more and more fed up until I schedule a haircut in a panic, at which point I begin the same hemming and hawing. Trim or slash? A little or a lot?

Hair isn’t everything, the Fleabag hairdresser says. And in a sense, he’s right. It’s just hair. My husband always reminds me that it will grow back. But it isn’t just hair, is it? There’s so much meaning I attach to this part of me. When I was little with a head like a dandelion gone to seed, I imagined it was the thing that set me apart, made me despicable to my same-same peers. When I got that Princess Mononoke haircut, I attached bravery to my hair, braiding in my sorrow at the harsh transition of a trans-Pacific move. Now, I am asking my hair to make me feel myself again. I want to be pleased with, if not at least interested by, the way I look. The last time I sat in Zachary’s chair I wasn’t yet a mother. My rib cage hadn’t shifted, I’d never attached plastic flanges to my nipples and prayed for a let down. I find myself in an entirely new state of being, both physically (hello postpartum hair loss and regrowth) and psychically. I feel stifled, fearful, sick of myself. I want to cut my way out of this feeling.

But that Fleabag scene I started this with, if you keep watching, you’ll see that the punchline of the joke isn’t Fleabag exclaiming that hair is everything. It’s when a disgruntled Anthony shows Fleabag and Claire the photo Claire gave as a reference of what she wanted her hair to look like. Anthony unfolds the picture and we see that Claire’s disastrous cut is exactly what she asked for. Fleabag’s face falls. Anthony says “If you want to change your life, change your life. It’s not going to happen in here.” It wasn’t a bad haircut after all. Instead, Claire was avoiding her unhappy marriage, a string of tragic miscarriages, her sense of tightly wound trappedness. She tried to make the haircut a big enough change, forcing it to take on meaning it could never manage.

That’s it then, isn’t it? Haircuts can be crystallizations of the transformation we wish to see in ourselves, transformations we have no business trying to pursue with a pair of scissors. Even if I wanted to, I can’t cut myself into a new life.

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What I’m trying to say is, if I had to describe what I want my hair to feel like without talking about hair I would say:

Verdant; green; in the way new buds are green; that tiny furl of color we see at the end of winter-dead branches; cool breeze and the humid fug of spring, when the ground gives up its hallelujah, an exhale for something to come; champagne; pink apple seltzer; the plate of parsley, lemon and radish that comes with your meal at a Persian place; a pair of red shoes to finish the classic blue jeans and a men’s white tee; the lightness of my tote bag when all that’s in it is my journal, my laptop, and a slim volume of something to send me sparking across the page; watching windows whip landscape into a film reel when you’re on a long distance train; train trips in general; a packed lunch to eat outside; the high G of my baby squealing as her daddy tumbles with her before bed; her belly a perfect scoop in a soft pink T; an acceptance in the inbox; an Alsatian white; riding a bicycle in peak summer; the feeling when you’re talking to an old friend and the pleasantries give way, your conversation hitting its stride, breaking into a run, a gallop, a leap; saying exactly what you mean to; being exactly as you are.