Confession: I Hate My Hair

It’s been ten years since the last time I saw my hair. I mean really saw it.

The image I project now — the hair you know, the hair I know — that’s hair that is manipulated by straightening tools that have been trained to beat the authenticity out of it. I’m not sure when the switch flipped and I conclusively decided that my natural hair didn’t suit me (when, really, who’s to say that my opinion knows better than my own DNA?) but I do remember the first time my mom ever straightened my hair with her blow dryer. I was 9 and we were going to my grandmother’s for New Years dinner. (Subsequently, it was the only night of the year for the following five years that I was allowed to have my hair straightened).

On that day, I felt this unusual sensation for the first time — like when I looked in the mirror, I saw a version of me that was better than the one I had known. I didn’t know I could manipulate my primordial features to better align with the adolescent-girl-wanted features of my fancies and when it became clear that I could, all bets were off.

I have hypothesized two possible reasons I hate my curly hair.

1. It’s not cool. I know there is substantial evidence that debunks this conjecture (case in point: Diana Ross, Ms. Solange Knowles, my own personal hero, Gilda Radner and New York’s most discernible fashion icon, Sarah Jessica Parker), but frankly, I feel incredibly self-conscious when my hair is left to run wild. Like a messier, less-in-control version of myself. Maybe this is because in my youth, all of my friends had pins, as opposed to looping straws emerging from their heads. Maybe if I’d known then that it’s okay to be different, even kind of cool to be different, I’d have adopted a different relationship with my head.

But I digress.

Reason #2. My mom’s hair is fairly curly too. Not exactly like mine but curly enough that I distinctly associate the smell of burnt-by-a-dryer-hair with my being a kid seated atop her toilet while I watched her wet strands transform to straight locks. It looked like magic fostered by the large gun-shaped tool she would put to her head while she combed her fingers through her hair, watching with satisfaction as the change progressed.

She has often told me that “hair matters. It can change how you feel about yourself.” I know that when she said this, it was to offer a solution to my young frustrations with myself (and maybe, too, to counter a disinterest I exhibited early to eschew showers in favor of oily hair) but I’m realizing that I took her words to mean that with curly hair, I’m not good enough.

I’ve filled in the blanks and come to believe that with straight hair, I am.

But this is an emotional handicap I am dutifully trying to overcome. Specifically because the relationship I’ve developed with my hair runs counter to the Man Repeller ethos. Here we shout: Be yourself! Embrace your flaws! Love who you are for who you are! — and I believe all of this, of course I do, but how can I expect macro-change to be set in motion when I am displaying symptoms of such wild insecurity that has been patched up by years of Band-Aids on a wound that has probably needed stitches.

Maybe hair is how I try to compensate for my fragile relationship with makeup. Ultimately, the goal is to feel good, right? So we should do whatever that takes. Whether that means straight hair, or no makeup or so much makeup or none of those things is irrelevant — these are just the practices we put in place to feel great.

Still, today I plan to try something: I’ll wear my curls out, I’ll fake pride until it almost feels real and every time I catch my reflection, I’ll smile at it.