speak
Hair grows
By Becka Cremer
bcremer@kansan.com
When I'm not sure who I am, I change my hair
I fought the tears threatening to stream down my face as I sat in a cold metal folding chair in the front row of seventh-graders in my middle school's gym. Our parents and siblings filled the bleachers for the end of the year awards assembly. My vice principal—a bald man who was a stickler for rules—had just finished yelling at me. He said I was a disgrace to Trailridge Middle School. I was an embarrassment. He was so disappointed in me.
I could see his point: I had straight "A"s and had placed in multiple math competitions and science fairs, but I had dyed my hair purple.
That day, my mom stood up for me. She—all 5-feet-2-inches of her—asked the principal to step into the girls' locker room where her yells echoed off the cinder block walls and into the hallway outside. I heard her ask him to compare me with the half-naked girl sitting next to me in the front row in the gym. Wasn't her strapless mini-dress more offensive than my purple hair? Weren't the piercings that decorated another girl's face more embarrassing for the school? Shouldn't my awards and honors eclipse my hair color?
I spent the next year alternately smiling and sobbing in the principal's office. I made honor roll. I dyed my hair green. I scored particularly well on a standardized test. My hair was pink. Community service award. Purple streaks. Science fair medal. Blue.
Most of my peers knew me as the girl with the colored hair—not as the overachiever—and that was how I defined myself, too. It was typical teenager stuff: striving to find an identity, blah, blah, blah.
And then, in ninth grade, when my hair was fried to hell and crunchy platinum blonde, I had it shaved off. My stylist even used her dad's nose hair clippers to carve a butterfly design in the back. The new hairstyle made me hard to miss, but also very hard to see.
When I think about my first few years of high school, they're divided into neat little chunks, defined by hairstyles: blonde, red, striped, spiked, crimped, short, shorter, shortest and, my personal favorite, white with pink and purple streaks. Sure, I joined a few clubs and was involved in some activities—and I was
still on the honor roll—but those things were a minor part of who I was and how I experienced high school. I had my gimmick. I was the hair.
During my junior year, I reverted to my natural hair color—mousey brown—and a basic bob. I had let my guard down long enough for people to see past the hair long enough to become my friends. Once they saw beyond the hair, it didn't matter as much. It was too late to hide behind it.
I had thought I was finished with Manic Panic hair dye and unusual hairstyles, but last year, as my relationship with my best friend was falling apart, I dropped more than $600 on six extra inches of hair—fusion extensions. For 11 months and 11 days, I had hair that reached past my shoulders. The upkeep ended up costing me more than $2,000, but I didn't care. I could wear it in a ponytail; I curled it; I even bought makeup and new clothes to match it.And it made me feel better about the failure of one of my most important relationships.
But I had started doing it again. I let my hair define who I was.
For the first part of those 11 months, I loved it. I loved running my fingers through my long, blonde locks. I loved
the comments I got each time someone new noticed how quickly my hair had "grown." I loved answering questions, especially "Is that your hair?" (Yes. It's mine. I paid for it.)
But then I had a hair epiphany. In the 11 months that I had had extensions, I had allowed myself to live like a different person—a person I wasn't sure I liked very much. I went from being a glass-of-wine-with-dinner girl to drinking more than my fair share at townie house parties and at concerts of bands I hated. In 11 months, my relative age went from 42 to about 19, and far too many of my decisions were based on what other people thought.
The new hair and the new personality masked the hole that the end of a friendship had left in my life,but they didn't fill it.When I realized I had been using my hair
(again) to distract me from loneliness, I knew the extensions had to go.
So in September 2008, my sister and I took pliers and scissors to my hair. We carefully pulled out each of the 10-inch, white blonde extensions and cut my hair to a reasonable length. We're slowly darkening the color back to what I've always considered mousey but my sister insists is "chocolate."
Graphic by Catherine Coquillette
February 12, 2009
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