Growing up, I’ve always been complimented on my hair. Straight and enviably thick, my raven hair fell in locks down to my waist by the time I was in middle school. I was no stranger to the coos of jealousy about how lovely my hair was, from friends and strangers alike. People let themselves touch my hair and comment on how long and healthy it appeared, and soon enough, I had convinced myself that it was something I loved about myself.
My mother would sit me down in my little grey Donald duck chair in front of the television to distract me with cartoons, placing herself behind to painstakingly detangle every single knot and then rub oil into my scalp as I whined about it. Then, she usually parted my hair to braid it before pinning down a string of jasmine flowers in full bloom between the braids.
This was a weekly ritual for me and my otherwise busy mother. Although I hated sitting still for hours on end, the braids pulling down on my scalp, and especially the smell of the flowers that gave me migraines throughout the night, I figured that was the only way to be close to my mother. Besides, my grandfather loved plucking fresh flowers from the garden to string into a small garland.
Everything that was done to my hair was an act of love. My grandmother, who lived a few cities away, often brought me powders of different colors that were naturally obtained to wash my hair with. I still remember the times I had scurried to sit on the floor before the couch, waiting for my father to dry off my hair with a towel immediately after a shower.
Back in school, everyone has started to identify me as the girl with beautiful hair. Honestly, the compliments felt amazing. It was the feature of myself that brought me as close as I could get to being conventionally attractive. Unlike being judged as the ‘rowdy kid’ or the ‘mischievous child’ as the shorter-haired girls were often termed, to me, my hair seemed to be the very embodiment of femininity.
My mother had a pixie cut in 12th grade. She did not want the same for me because she was often judged based on it. She claimed to have been referred to as being “Mannerless, Uncontrollable, Indisciplined…” and so on. To spare me from all of that, especially being blessed with the thick hair I have, I laughed at the notion of me having shorter hair.
However, the mirage faded when we moved to Chennai. I was frustrated with how infrequently I was able to wash my hair because of all the time it required to air-dry. I had developed a case of head lice from the neglect and I did not have the time to tend to it with the pressure of the new school piling up on me. It weighed me down.
Beyond this, my hair had also started to fall out in clumps. Maybe it was because of the stress from the new environment, the unfamiliar quality of the water at our new house, or as a symptom of a minor health condition that I was diagnosed with years later.
My hair no longer brought me joy. I had to choose between how I looked: as the girl with beautiful long hair who was complimented often, or how I felt: someone who was not in control of their life or how they looked. So I chose the sensible option. I chopped it off.
It was barely a big change. My hair, at that point, fell just a little past my shoulders. But, in my mind, all the weight on my shoulders had been taken away by some unnamed cosmic hair entity.
People were initially bewildered.
“Why did you cut off all that thick hair?”
“You used to look prettier with longer hair.”
“This looks okay, but I think longer hair suits you more. Are you going to grow it back?”
Even my parents were hesitant about letting me make such a drastic change.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care about being pretty or feminine or conventionally attractive. I was a twelve-year-old girl with what probably was the shortest hair I’ve had in my life until that point and it wasn’t particularly a hairstyle for beauty magazines. It was blunt and it made my widow’s peak more prominent and it showed off my double chin spectacularly well. And despite all of that, I was happy.
It started off as a little act of rebellion. It was a way to let go of the past, and accept my new life in Chennai. As simple as it was, the haircut liberated me. Like all the previous times, this haircut was an act of love too. Not from my grandmother in the form of a new hair product, or my mother’s time, or my grandfather waiting on the jasmine buds, but one from myself.
I began enjoying experimenting with my hair. I tried styles that I liked and those I didn’t. I had gotten used to scaring my mother in the mornings when she watched me step out of the bathroom with a pair of scissors and a bag of severed hair from my head to dispose of. In this quarantine alone, I had dyed my hair purple just for the sake of it and given myself haircuts that I’m not, in the slightest, proud of.
Today, my hair barely grazes my neck. It’s styled into a neat boy-cut that is easy for me to deal with and it leaves people with a face of horror when they think back to the time I had outrageously lengthy hair.
I’m often called a “boy,” and I think it’s meant to be an insult, but I do not associate my worth with the length of my hair any longer. The length of my hair brings me confidence, and what others might think does not change that.
My name is Leina, my hair is short, and I’m happy.
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Author
Leina Queen
A teen in her eleventh grade, Leina loves to write, bake, cook, sing, binge-watch anime, illustrate and do a dozen other crazy things. She believes in gender equality and equity. She is a passionate reader and chef de cuisine. She dreams of being a Chefpreneur soon.
