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This Is Us
From Medusa to Samson: a Personal History of My Treacherous Hair
For women, what’s on our head is who we are
I regarded myself in the mirror, teeth gritted. In my right hand, I wielded a pair of scissors, their blank shininess reflecting my tormented glance. In my left hand, I held the scraps of my self-esteem. I raised the scissors to my forehead and caught my hair — a few dozen strands or so. With a simple squeeze of the handles, the withered locks, those dead parts of me, fell. I felt a surge of relief.
I kept going until I had hair in name only, a protective sheath of close-cropped strands. With the scissors under a cold stream of water, I ran my fingers through the remaining peach fuzz.
With my treacherous hair gone, I could move forward.
“When I look in the mirror, my hair feels like me, like a part of my identity.” — Elizabeth W., Oregon
As a young child, my natural blond waves perfectly complemented my gapped teeth and button nose. Everyone in my family had curly dark hair, but early on, I was an outlier.
Eventually, nature caught up, and my hair turned brown and curly. I did not take well to the transition. My beloved brush snagged and broke my curls, and as I battled for popularity in a school full of young Southern belles, I wept for the loss of my blondness.
The breaking point came when Ashley Jane, an eternally popular girl and the darling of the local theater community, went blond. Although she first resembled Cruella de Vil as they transitioned her hair, she eventually became our local Marilyn. I firmly believe that going blond helped her land the titular role in our production of Annie, which, ironically, meant her new locks had to be concealed under a wig.
My mother took me to a hairdresser named Pat, whose hairstyle seemed perpetually stuck in the 1980s. Sadly, my curls weren’t dramatic enough to reach ‘80s-level epic-ness, though Pat certainly tried. She’d turn her hands into claws and scrunch my hair to no end, then stroke the sides into wild wings as she chewed her gum with an open mouth. I always left the salon with hair that approximated a…
