The Art Of Chopping Hair

When I was 17, I was eyes wide open through a nightmare. My hair was involuntarily chopped off.

I’m sure one of your friends have locked herself in the bathroom next to the cafeteria during the first half of your school’s lunch break because her hair was so short she was massaging her scalp with olive oil, trying to get her hair to grow. Right? All I wanted was layers in my long virgin hair for the Senior portraits. So I pointed. Start here. And when I looked up, I was ten inches lighter. I ran out in tears.

Safe to say I never looked down again while sitting in a salon chair. And for the next 10 years, every hairdresser that touched my coveted locks were reminded of my only rule: no short hair.

I was born with a full head of silky thick black hair like a Peruvian baby doll. My mother tells me that strangers would ask to touch my hair because they couldn’t believe it was real. I can’t imagine someone asking to pet my baby but for my mother, saying yes and smiling was probably the easiest way to make someone go away if you didn’t speak their language. Now that I have a say on who can touch my hair, I still agree to let strangers touch it after a friend told me about some evil eye myth where a hair-touching refusal meets a jealous stare which causes hair to fall off. Shit freaks me out.

Short hair was never a thing for me growing up. My mother, on the other hand, traded in her naturally straight hair for a short permed fro in the ‘90s. Even my sister rocked a bob at age 7. Mine was kept long and wavy. The baby hairs were tamed. I had a collection of colored cotton scrunchies. My dad even mastered the ponytail, which consisted of pulling my hair back so tight that I would sigh in relief when I was able to put my hair down after school.

Growing out of my awkward tween phase into my high school years, my long hair became my beauty playmate. I learned what a straightening iron was and what a curling iron did. I even scrunched my hair with mousse and bought my first blow-dryer attachment, a diffuser. I was unstoppable.

I also had my braces taken off and learned what blush, mascara and eyeliner can do. Unstoppable.

Until my Eve-like hair was chopped off to just above my shoulders in the middle of my senior year.

I remember hiding in the bathroom during lunch break for an entire week because I felt ugly, but most of all naked. My long hair had become my security blanket, and I wasn’t ready for it to be pulled away. My hair chop came with an explanation that I repeated over and over again. “It wasn’t by choice,” I told my high school bubble and my high school crush.

Hair grows. This we know. But don’t tell that to a 17-year-old who has nothing better to do than take 20 minutes to put mascara on.

Over the next 10 years, my hair grew. It grew while I was going through a mentally abusive relationship followed by a just as damaging break-up. It grew while surviving many careless nights of feeling lucky that I made it home. It grew while I was recovering from a terrifying car accident. My injuries actually all took place below my hair length. Tough ass security blanket.

Long hair is beautiful. A detail that is ingrained in our minds, boys and girls alike, from early on. Many cultures, including the Latino culture, perceive long strong hair as the epitome of beauty. Indigenous Latin American women are often depicted with long braided hair. The ideal Latina, at least the one the world knows through film and television, always has the signature long flowing locks.

I had the chance to make my own decision and “chop off” my hair this time. It isn’t as short as it was 10 years ago. Eight inches lighter compared to 10. It was liberating. I was getting ready to move to a new country and didn’t have to explain to my soon-to-be new friends why I felt like going short. They will never probe and ask the same basic are-you-going-through-a-breakup question a girl gets asked who decides to drastically cut the hair she took so much pride in. And I won’t have to repeatedly respond with a “can I live?”

Hair grows. So I’m not hyperventilating and massaging whatever miracle hair-growth formula I read about in Cosmo into my roots this time. I also didn’t cry when my hairdresser cut straight through the bulk of hair that she managed to fit in her fist. She raised it up like a prize and laughed a little. I saw her smile through the mirror. I smiled too.

Days before I did it, I had a few concerned friends call me up to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. And maybe I was at the time, but mainly it was a test to see how far I could push myself out of the comfort zone of my warm blanket of tresses without having to wait another 10 years.

So far, I’m just fine.

Illustration by goodaughter.