Hair-story.

It starts with my mother crying in the car as rain claws rivers down the windshield and pummels each second with its deafening fall. She has been crying a lot recently and it is my fault. My fault for revealing landmines in a territory always mapped as safe and then helplessly watching them blow up in her face. It is funny how weather tends to lend itself to sorrow, and as I watched the sky cry with her the world seemed to look at me with the same derision. It is your fault, it told me. Pour cement into your cracks and paint yourself as new. Be more modest about your difference. Do anything but this.

I brush my fingertips over the gentle coarseness of my newly shaved hair, drawing the blanket of my fringe across my eyes like a shield. I don’t know whether this is to keep the pain in or out, but I am sure that I cannot let this wall fall. She looks at me through her own tear mist, clutching at memories of her perfect daughter, and that’s when she says it: “you were so pretty”.

My body has never been my property. First it was owned by my parents, and then by a society that made it clear that I was not good enough. Expectation has a monopoly on what should be rightfully ours and forces such conformity that we adopt a full disguise just to hide our truths. There is no such thing as apolitical dress. We are all statements of our purpose and project our desires through our presentation and deeds; yet reclaiming one’s self is often harder than finding your voice in the first place.

The day that I cut my hair came a while after the day that I told my parents that I was gay. It was the culmination of a hurricane which had swept away my security and threatened to destroy the foundations of my home. The support which I had been so sure of had failed to materialise and I was left floating on a tattered identity which I was forgetting how to assert. My hair was a way to tether myself to the sense of community which I so badly needed. It was a statement of my resilience against those who told me that I could not be, and proved to myself that I was stronger than my shattered heart believed.

Three years later when it reached my shoulders again, I looked in the mirror and did not recognise myself. That identity which I had defended with such conviction was nowhere to be seen, lost somewhere with the pain of the past. I had tried to hybridise myself into a form which would please both my parents and I but had only succeeded in a half truth. Some days I see the way my mother looks at me and I am so proud that she thinks that I am pretty. Some days I see the way my mother looks at me and I wonder if I am only dressing up for her. My identity is so inflected by the gaze of others that my femaleness is frequently other to me.

I take power from the way that my hair curls and hides my face if I’m feeling shy. It is as much a part of me now as it was then, yet I still cannot untangle the knots of my past. When I tell people that I date humans they often dismiss me as curious or confused, but my truths are as honest as they were when my mother cried over a lost imagining. My hair can never be just another accessory as it is bound to expectations which others use to define me without really listening. I’m still working out how I feel about that.

Now when my mother tells me that she hopes I meet a nice boy at university, my hair agrees. She can pretend that her image of a perfect daughter still lives. The problem with hair is that it grows, grows new meanings and obscures the truth. I want to get an undercut, find a middle way where our hopes can meet and make peace; yet I know that this is not possible. In claiming ownership of my hair I reclaim my difference, and this will always leave my truth far too exposed.