My hair’s been blue-black, platinum, orange, various shades of red, including the cherry-red shade Claire Danes rocked in My So-Called Life. At one point in college I doused my head with a bunch of green food coloring, thinking it would turn my hair green. In reality, it just made it look perpetually dirty.
I did all this coloring by myself, never in the care of a stylist. It wasn’t because I didn’t have the money. Typically I just got a wild hair up my ass and had to change my hair immediately. This compulsion meant the only thing to do was go buy a box of hair dye—sometimes from Rite Aid at two in the morning—to do it myself.
Why did I feel the need to constantly adjust the color, length and style of my hair? Because it gave me a buzz just like knocking back a fifth of vodka. I had an inner restlessness, a need to act out coupled with a desire for attention. All of this was stewing inside me long before I discovered the high you could get from eating dozens of Oreos, drinking tons of booze or popping a fistful of Adderall.
This pattern started when I was a little girl.
I’d wake up on a Saturday morning at the age of eight or something, look in the mirror and discover I was bored and miserable with my hair. So, I would beg my mother to drive me to Fantastic Sam’s or Super Cuts or whatever place would take me without an appointment (walk-in places are enablers for hair-cut addicts like myself). I’d tell the stylist to hack it all off, usually to my chin. And they would do it! Then I’d immediately regret it and feel sick inside.
What is most shocking is that my mother would actually take me to get my hair lopped off on demand. I was that persistent. I begged and begged until she probably just wanted me to shut up. But the pattern or habit (or what was probably my first addiction) lasted decades. I now understand that sobbing over a bad haircut is one of the most pathetic “problems” a first-world girl can have, but I just didn’t have any perspective for the first 30 years of my life.
Here’s a brief history of my hair. I cut bangs myself in the eighth grade because for some strange reason I absolutely had to have bangs one Sunday afternoon. They ended up extremely crooked, and I cried for at least three weeks because I looked so stupid. Then, when I was a freshman in high school, I went to an expensive salon in Beverly Hills determined to walk out looking extra-chic like the supermodel Amber Valetta on the cover of Vogue. I carried a beat-up copy of the magazine under my arm, and, after showing the stylist a picture of her super-short hair, I merrily said, “I want to look just like that!”
The stylist proceeded to cut my hair in this weird bowl shape, which looked nothing like the picture. And since my hair is naturally curly, the bowl looked absolutely ridiculous. It was made even worse—yes, that’s possible—by the four-inch rat tail she left dangling from the nape of my neck down to the top of my shoulders. I went home and immediately cut the rat tail off, but not before my dad told me, “It looks like someone took a lawnmower to your head.” I was depressed for about two years after that and developed a borderline eating disorder from the fallout. I guess I thought the haircut made me look fat.
So this has been the pattern. Grow my hair long, hack it off in one fell swoop, then cry. Sometimes for a week or two or even a few months or years at a time, depending on how screwed-up I look. Going through psychological traumas like breakups spurred this pattern into my adulthood. I’d like to say the tears over haircuts ended after I turned, say, 20 or something, but that’s a lie. They kept flowing and flowing all the way up until I was 28, the year I finally wound up in a psych unit for two weeks and started trying to get sober.
That year, 2007, I hacked my hair off by myself into an uneven pixie cut with a pair of heavy-duty scissors, the orange-plastic-handled kind that can cut swiftly through a USB cable or maybe even a major artery. Really, I should have used some professional shears to achieve the look, or at least the amateur ones you can get at Sally’s Beauty Supply for $19.99, because the result was uneven and choppy. It was yet another impulse chop, a hangover-induced hack fueled also by mania, a fresh breakup and the fact that one week prior I fried my chin-length bob into a noxious shade of copper whilst trying to crank up my hair’s burgundy shade to platinum.
After six peroxide soaks, my hair was fragile and brittle, frizzing out around my face like a tumble weed. I just sort of lived with it, until I began thumbing through some women’s magazine that was sitting on the table on the big wraparound porch of the Victorian house that I shared with a bunch of other USC students. Typically, I didn’t read fashion or beauty magazines, although I did (and do) find Seventeen and Teen very entertaining. I’m not sure why that day I flipped through the contents. Inside, there was a how-to article on cutting your own hair, and one of the styles was a darling pixie that looked oh-so chic on the model photographed.
I was supposed to twist my hair in chunks, separate it and take my time. I did try that for a few minutes, but I got impatient and just started hacking. One side would get too short, so then I’d cut the other side shorter, then the other side was too long, and this went on until I only had about a quarter inch of hair left. Throughout the entire ordeal I was laughing to myself like a loon. Now the last thing I want to do is further stigmatize mental illness with this whole loony laughing, chopping hair mess, but sadly this is my experience. “It looks like someone took a lawnmower to your head,” my dad said again when he saw the new do.
Now that I’ve been sober and (for the most part) stable for nearly seven years, my hair actually looks normal. It’s been my natural color—light brown—for about six-and-a-half years now. As for lopping it all off? Nope. I’ve simply gotten regular trims, although recently I got a three-inch trim along with a bit of shaping that added layers around my face. I pretty much still look the same (except to my mother, who insists that if my hair is too long it drags my face down).
This may seem like the dumbest milestone in the world. And to the people who’ve read my writing and called me just “immature” and a “narcissist” that’s cool. I get it. I’m not in a developing nation—I have it really good. But I’m really glad that compulsion to cut or dye my hair (along with the urge to get tattoos or piercings) has left me. It’s great to just chill without needing to change some aspect of my appearance to feel alive.
Thank God I got to this point by the age of 30.
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