My hair is almost at my waist now. I’m in conversations with a stylist about getting a professional haircut. It’s writhing a little, in my stomach, to think about that. It’s an oddly charged thing in my brain. Since I turned 16, I’ve had my hair cut professionally twice. The first time was to shave my head, when the hair started falling with chemo. I could have waited, I suppose, and let my hair shed over days. It never occurred to me that I might have chosen not to.
The second time was technically a second and a third time. My hair was long enough to be tied into a ponytail, and I’d been learning about curly hair. Between the hernia surgery, and the emergency surgery, I found a hair dressing school that did cheap haircuts and my mother and I took a taxi about an hour away from where we were staying. The parlour was poorly lit, we couldn’t see the mirror, and unsurprisingly, both our haircuts were awful. My mother’s hair was cut too short, but there was still hope for mine, so I went to another place, and the hairdresser there did his best to fix it. "Let it grow, come back in a year, and I'll give you a nice haircut" he said.
I was more upset about this haircut going wrong than I had been about the prospect and the actual loss of all my hair to chemotherapy. Hair has a way of being punishing in the context of femininity. The prospect of losing my hair with chemo, if anything, seemed like a mercy.
Since my pre-teens, I've carried the expected post-colonial loathing and shame of my body hair. The cancer had messed with my hormones, and for at least a year leading up to the diagnosis, my facial hair had also been growing in thicker and faster. It was such a relief to go from needing to shave each day, to having just no hair on my body. Everyone else, though, was too preoccupied with the bald head to notice the flawless skin that I still reminisce about.
People gave me scarves, offered me wigs and told me not to worry- it would grow back. Like with the people whose first response is “Can you still have children?” when they learn that I had ovarian cancer, they had this weird need to protect me from this loss of femininity. Fortunately, I didn’t quite have that hang-up. Somehow, I’d seen enough images of femininity with baldness, that it didn’t grate quite that way. I’d thought about shaving my head before, getting flowers tattooed on my scalp even.
Fashion and style are powerful tools to work on your self esteem, and to cope with trauma like losing a whole lot of bodily autonomy. As much fun as I had going overboard with the make-up and jewellery, eventually, I ran out of steam. I was too weak, and tired, and bitter. Then, there were three tubes coming out of my neck, and I just didn’t have it in me to try and look nice.
Today I’m grateful for having been bald when it wasn’t my choice. It hurt, of course, watching the pile of my hair being swept into a dustpan while the shape of my head emerged, when it hurt a little, to think of how much further I would be from a general state of desirability. But that loss allowed me to just be. When the jewellery and make-up stopped and there was no hair, there was nothing I could to do about my appearance.
But, there was a liberation in knowing that I could not look like anyone’s idea of beautiful. It wasn’t about struggling to deal with how conventionally undesirable my appearance was, and then accepting it. It was a liberation from thinking about my appearance at all.
That liberation sits in an uncomfortable space with how long it was before I could look at my body without a sense of revulsion, but I know necessary that was nonetheless. As excited as I am to get my curls professionally groomed, I know that my enjoyment of them would have been a lot more unhealthy if I hadn’t been able to occupy the more neutral space of recognizing that my appearance was objectively insignificant in light of everything else going on with my body.
