I fall squarely into the category of People Who Do Bad Things to Their Hair (PWDBTTH). A more generous name for our club might be People Who Take Creative Risks with Their Hair (PWTCRTH), but a) that name is inaccurate and b) its acronym lacks onomatopoetic appeal. PWDBTTH! is the very sound I make when I see what my hair actually looks like after First Shampoo. But let me go back to the beginning.
I was born with strictly anonymous hair. It is of no particular color or texture. My mom used to lament its lack of body, but I would take it a step further: my hair has no nature. It is no there there hair.
I mostly left it alone as a teenager, sensing quite rightly that my self-esteem was balanced on the thinnest high-wire and could not survive a strong breeze, let alone henna. I was also powerfully attracted to the idea of natural beauty, partly at the insistence of Seventeen magazine (to be achieved through the application of barely-there make-up), and partly because I went to prep school. A lot of the girls at my school wore a t-shirt with a black dog on it that they bought at Martha’s Vineyard. When they talked about their vacations they dropped poor Martha and just called it “The Vineyard,” and I remain convinced to this day that the fruit of that particular vineyard is not grapes but those girls themselves, lissome, shiny-haired, and really good at field hockey.
I was filled with craven longing for their effortlessness, their naturalness, their homogeneous and beautiful nature. Worse than the longing itself was the fear it would be detected, so though I tried out for field hockey the first week of freshman year, I maintained to myself and anyone who was interested (mom) that I acted purely for the love of sport, plus also the righteous challenge of mastering something new. (I later found rowing, even preppier in its way, but also a secret haven for tall uncoordinated longing-filled geeks.)
By the time I got to college my longing was no less intense but much less pure. I wasn’t sure I liked the thing I wanted, and I was pretty sure I didn’t admire it. To be more precise: I did admire it, but I also knew the thing I admired was other people’s luck, not their effort, and that smacked of jealousy, and that was depressing. So, I bleached my hair. I did it during a semester in London. It took three hours and I went straight from the salon to meet my classmates at a play. I think it was Coriolanus. I got there late, after the lights went down, and as I squeezed past their knees to my seat I had the sensation that my head had turned into a small sun, radiating light and heat. Don’t be dumb, I told myself. Everyone in London has crazy hair. No one is even looking at you.
One of my friends leaned in from two seats away. “Um. Your head is glowing.”
“It’s platinum blond,” I said.
“It’s Big Bird.”
A few applications of toner later I had achieved a more Marilyn look, which was better, but also less me. My own hair was like a wig, an awesome wig, but still a wig. It also sort of itched like a wig. I went on to dye my hair red, brown, black, and striped; I cut big bangs and minimal bangs; I wore it short and long and long-long. Recently I got a sort of choppy long highlighted shag that looked terrific when I left the salon but suburban and faintly purple after First Shampoo. I don’t leave the house without six bobby pins and my old friend jealousy, and together we bristle and moon over women with long-long hair like the kind I just lopped off.
The problem with all this is I cannot change what is in my heart. My heart is not glamorous or preppy. My heart is not a pixie or a zebra or Joni Mitchell. My heart is the heart of a seeker. My heart is PWDBTTH!
The project of my heart, my true nature, is to wonder. Who who who? How how how? Better better better? I set out to answer the question, I return with strange hair, I hope and try again. Always optimistic, often disappointed, immune to lessons. I will always want to know what it is to be someone other than me. I’m my own fiction, but only on my head. Hair we shed.
