It finally happened. I got a haircut.
You guys following me on Twitter and Instagram saw last week that I was nervously sitting in the stylist’s chair at Vidal Sassoon here in NYC.
I needed a major change in my style, and it was waaay past time for a haircut.
Now, I don’t know if this is the same for guys, but I have a lot of feelings and emotions wrapped up in my hair.
Until I was about twelve years old, I had a full-on bowl cut.
Thanks to a weird convergence of tomboyishness and intense gymnastics workouts, I decided that short hair was the way to go so I wouldn’t “have to bother with it” as I put it to my mother. Just a couple decades past Mary Lou Retten.
I bopped along happily with my decidedly boyish haircut until around 6th grade, when I had the – quite obvious – revelation, that I was a girl. And a pretty boy crazy girl at that.
Looking around at all the popular girls in my class, I noticed that, huh, none of them had bowl cuts (oh, by the way, this should be obvious but i was NOT a popular girl in grade school. I was the weirdo who played Ninja Turtles at recess with her best friend, who was a boy, which, was just. not. done.)
So I decided to make a change. A big one. I started growing my hair out and by my 13th birthday, I had long hair that hung limply around my face and down my back.
By that time, I’d given up gymnastics (I’d grown too tall to ever catch up with Mary Lou even if I’d wanted to…which I didn’t) and taken up diving. It was fun to get my hair wet in the pool and see the straight line cut across my back. no layers, no shape, just long long hair. i’d gone too far the other way. I was now a girl with long “mall hair”.
When I moved to New York City at 18, everyone at the hair salon where I worked tried to convince me to cut it – get bangs, chop it into a bob. But I could not be moved. “Long hair is what’s pretty,” I thought. “It’s what boys like on girls.”
Never mind that up to that point, I’d never had a boyfriend in my life, I had it in my head that:
Long hair = girly = pretty.
I’d had a bowl cut when I was a tomboy; to embrace my femininity, I knew I KNEW I had to have long hair. At least, that’s what 13-year-old Megan thought, and some of the things we get in our heads at that age are ridiculously hard to let go of.
Then a few years ago, after a bad breakup that coincided with a quarter life crisis that left me reevaluating my career, friends, and pretty much anything else that can be questioned in your twenties, I decided to do something drastic – cut all my hair off, or dye it.
I dyed it.
Blonde.
It looked terrible.
Immediately, I began growing it all back out again. luckily, my growing period coincided with an “ombre” trend in hair where two-tone color that looks bleached in the sun was really hip. So unwittingly, I came out ahead of the trend.
But here’s the thing about color-treated hair – it’s damaged. Like, really really damaged.
The longer my hair grew, the more knotted it became. It got to be that I couldn’t even sleep with my hair out of a ponytail without waking up with a huge dreadlocks forming at the nape of my neck.
It took me ten minutes to brush my hair before I could even get in the shower so that I wouldn’t wind up with one huge sopping snarl on my head.
I knew I had to cut it. But also knew that a lot of weird feelings about my womanhood (for lack of a less cheesy term) are wrapped up in my hair. It’s a security blanket that’s constantly draped on my head.
It was time for a style refresh.
So this is what I went into the salon chair with. Poor Lisa at Sassoon had to be a stylist and a shrink. Thankfully, she was up to the challenge. She was understanding about my nerves, but also – smartly – didn’t give me too much time to think about it before she got to chopping.
The result?
Hair I can actually run my fingers through, and more of a “style” than I’ve had in years.
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