Everyone, especially men on the street, called me ‘blondie’ after I bleached my hair one summer. ‘Hey, blondie! Hey!’ I had it in a bob then, short and swingy, the double-process I got done at a cheap salon in Connecticut leaving me towheaded and ethereal — a dandelion, an angel in the wilderness. I was a novelty to those who didn't know me, both blonde and Asian, the collusion of two fantasies that got me catcalled in all kinds of improbable configurations. As my bob grew out and my dark roots began to show, the nickname dropped off, but the long, blonde ponytail stayed.
I've always been attached to my hair. Asian girls are supposed to keep it long as a point of beauty and pride, according to every family member who admired mine when I was growing up. My hair grows fast, luscious and thick, pin-straight but soft to the touch; it keeps a wave in it if I put it in a topknot while it dries. It's pleasing when messy, has always fallen over my eyes in just the right way. It was always something I could hide behind when I was shy — there must be dozens of photos of me in college, all from the same angle, where I'm peering out from behind a waterfall of dark hair, holding a Djarum Black — and it was always something that I could exploit, like the way I learned to tangle my hands in it while fucking someone, on top. For all my adult life I kept it long while it picked up scents like the reek of cigarette smoke and the dry, woody heat of bonfires and the sweaty, musky smell of sex. I liked that it was thick, that it held my history. When I used to paint self-portraits, I used my hair as shorthand — that was how everyone would know it was me, and it was how I would know I was myself. It was shorthand for my physicality, my desire; it was desire itself.
The itch to shave my head began suddenly. One hot summer night, a full year after I went blonde, I couldn't stop thinking about it. It was like a fever had caught somewhere deep in my body and wouldn't let up. Soon it became irrational, like I would die if I didn't do it. I started texting my friends things like, what do u think the shape of my head looks like? do u think it's cute? and do u think it would be totally deranged if i shaved my head? and: i rly rly rly wanna shave my head and, mere hours after setting my phone's lock screen to a picture of Zayn Malik with a swamp-green buzzcut, GUYS I THINK I'M GOING TO DO IT TONIGHT.
That night — late June, a breeze coming in through the open window — I sat cross-legged on a layer of newspaper on our kitchen floor as my best friend Santi cut off ten inches of bleach-blonde ponytail with a pair of scissors — a keepsake I'd later lose, find, and throw away when moving out of that house a year later. They turned on the clippers and ran them up the nape of my neck in long, clean lines.
And there was so much hair — an ocean of hair, a country of hair, blonde with dark roots. A kingdom of hair, a golden crown, a de-throned throne. We were sweeping for days after. Even as we worked it seemed impossible that I could go through with it, that I could change myself so completely — the clipper moving in slow tracks along my skull. The hot mechanical buzz of it shooting down my body, prickling through my lower back. Making my toes curl, making my stomach clench. My roommate Clare documented the whole process, taking pictures of me with all the punk haircuts in reverse — undercut, Chelsea, mohawk, and then, with one final run of the clippers on my crown, a neat buzzcut, my hair as short and fine and even as newly-mown grass.
Freshly shorn, I was struck by how much of myself remained. It was like I was still me — of course I was — but without the armature of external self I'd developed over the years to hide behind, my face felt new even to me. Open. Honest. My head, it turns out, was perfectly shaped, because it was the shape of my head. I felt impossibly free, giddy and unburdened, unbearably light. I couldn't stop touching what was left of my hair, running my fingers over the velvety short fuzz. I'd catch myself moving as though expecting my hair to fall, but there was nothing there — just me, solidly in the mess of myself.
Shaving all or part of one's head is a common practice across religious faiths — there's even a word for it within that context, tonsure, from the Latin tōnsūra, meaning ‘clipping’ or ‘shearing’, which originated within medieval Catholicism but now refers to the religious practice overall. The logic for the practice varies from tradition to tradition, but the common theme is that ritually removing our hair might free us of attachments — from greed, from vanity, from other people's perceptions of us. Buddhist monks of all genders ritually shave their heads when they enter their orders and maintain it as long as they are practising, some shaving their heads as frequently as every two weeks. It was this aesthetic ideal I had in mind — and yes, Zayn too, though I suspect he shaved his head for the same soul-searching, monkish reasons as I — when I decided to buzz my head. I hoped that the asceticism of the decision would make itself immediately apparent to me — that it would manifest in my spirit as soon as it manifested on my head.
There were other reasons — there are always other reasons; it wasn't as spontaneous as I might make it seem, the way you can tell a story any number of ways to prove a point. I'd shaved part of my head before, when I was nineteen. That year, I buzzed half my head because my grandmother died and I needed a visual expression of my grief. I was crazy with sadness, smoking too much weed and drinking during the day, and one April afternoon I went to my friend Nicky's house and said, ‘Please buzz it off, please.’ I parted my hair and waited for the blade to come, running my fingers along my scalp. For days after, I'd run my fingers over the soft, bare patch of skin, measuring time with its slow growth. Eventually, it all grew back, just the same as any other patch of hair, the way flesh knits over a wound.
A few weeks before I shaved my head — all of it this time — I was at a party at a friend of a friend of a friend's house. By party, I mean it was very late, and I was in a group of men, and I only knew two of them, and I was a pretty, anonymous girl with a long blonde ponytail who seemed like something that someone could grab and fuck. When I closed my eyes for a moment as the sun came up, someone in the room said: ‘Okay, someone tell me, whose girl is that?’ There was a silence, and then one of the men I knew said, ‘She's no one's’, and though I'm grateful for that moment, I was enraged that it had needed to come to pass.
And I was tired of it, of everything — of being so visible in the world, like a flame or a dandelion or a lightning bolt; of being feminine in predictable ways; of being desirable in ways that were uninteresting and invasive to me. I had just gone through a breakup — there's always a breakup in a story about a haircut — that seemed to have no end, as my ex and I kept stretching back towards each other like the snapping of rubber bands. It wasn't that I thought I was going to totally disappear, to be replaced with some shining and pure version of myself, but that I hoped maybe some kind of metaphysical metamorphosis would take place. I wanted everything to change; I wanted to be delivered some different future, some alternative path that I could just take without asking and without having to think.
I've always questioned the utility of our concept of the self. Maybe that's not quite it — I know why we think the self exists, why we believe in individuals and identity, I'm just not sure it actually lives anywhere we can find it. Not anywhere I can find it, anyway, not when I haven't been able to strip every aspect of my own character away down to an empty nub. I've always been aware of the artifice I've maintained and developed over the years: the rotating cast of dramatic glasses frames, the septum ring, the clothes, the tattoos, the long hair I always found a way to hide behind. If you took all that away, I wondered, what would remain? Who would I reveal myself to be all along? I imagined pulling everything of myself apart, the way you can pluck the petals right off a rose by holding onto the pale green and stamen-wiry heart and twisting the flower in your fist. What would mine look like, once I had shed the velvety petals and let the colours fall away?
You don't shave your head without wanting everything to change. I wanted to run away from myself. Maybe it was me trying to channel the materialists, convinced that if my physical circumstance changed, the rest of me would too, and then I would have achieved nirvana, and then I wouldn't worry about anything ever again. What a dream that we would all like to believe is true — that the outside might ever reflect the in. But you already know what actually happened, and I suspect I already knew it too: of course we remain ourselves. Of course we are incapable of being anyone but whom we have been all this time.
A few days after I buzzed my head, I slept with my ex again. And again. And again. The short hair didn't change the way I was treated by men — the catcalls might have shifted in content, but the number didn't decrease; if anything, I got more attention. I still had the same anxieties; still had the same inexplicable, waterlogged depression; still had the same job and life and plans. I didn't become any more loving, or kind, or generous. I was still me, just with a different shadow, one that startled me when I saw it moving on the ground.
But it would be too simple to say that nothing truly changed. Of course I was different. It wasn't that a new life was handed to me, but that I felt I was capable of building one on my own. After the buzzcut, I felt tougher, harder — clean and useful, like a freshly sharpened blade. When you have no hair, especially if you're coded as feminine, there's nothing to hide behind. People look at you, even if they're not intending to; it's because they have nowhere else to look. It forces you out of being shy, makes you reckon with the white-hot gaze of the world. With my head shaved, I started wearing dresses again and experimenting with ways of presenting that varied from the usual routines I'd fallen into. Why not start looking in the mirror again, if what I had to look upon had suddenly changed and was now exciting and new? It seemed possible to be everything at once, even if I didn't know which part of everything was the part I wanted to hold. All of a sudden I had been presented with a blank slate — just not the blank slate that I was expecting.
For the first time in my life, I was strikingly, visibly queer. More than that, or perhaps more exciting to me, I was suddenly androgynous in a way that I'd only dreamed about before. The femininity that I'd been so proud of, the softness that I'd learned to treat as strength was also, I realised, something that had been chosen for me, never something that I had intentionally decided to make for myself. Now it was shorn away — how easy it had been, to remove a lifetime of being looked at as explicitly feminine, and how complicated the effects of it.
What I found myself presented with at this juncture was choice. I didn't have to look like a girl; I didn't have to be soft, or pretty, or easy to look at. I didn't have to be the messy-haired vixen that I had constructed myself as in my teens — in fact, I couldn't be that person anymore. I had removed something — not irreversible, but certainly not something that could be repaired in an instant — and it was up to me decide, and to continue to decide, what to do with it.
I think I was worried, then, and perhaps I am still worried about it now — that in cutting away something that had always been such an integral part of me, I would lose all sense of who I was and tumble into the chasm of not knowing myself. After the first cut, and shorn like a lamb, it fell upon me to maintain my edge. More than the first, which didn't feel like a decision so much as it felt like a verdict coming down, each haircut I've had since then has felt like a conscious reification of my self.
At first I made my friends do it. It was easy enough — just put the clippers on level 2 and run over the whole thing like mowing a lawn. Santi did it a few times. Once, I made my ex do it, in exchange for all the times that I'd buzzed his sides for him before, in an interaction that was neatly circular but didn't help my progress through our breakup one bit. I grew to anticipate when it was time for a trim — when you've got almost no hair at all, even a millimetre feels like fuzzy, prickly overgrowth — and eventually I switched to going to a barbershop.
It feels naïve to say this now, but there was so much that I had to learn. There was an entire vocabulary, a language of becoming with which I had no prior history — aside from doing my friends' fades in a pinch when they needed it, I had no idea how to talk about short hair. I talked to friends with short hair about what words to use, how to describe the self that I hoped to etch out in every visit. I learned to say high and tight, to say, keep the sides short, to describe the way I wanted the back of my hairline to be shaped (round, but clean, and can you please trim the sideburns too). I learned to think in numbers — at first a 2 all over, then a 1 on the sides and a 2 on top, then a 3, as I experimented with growing it out.
And I learned to love the barbershop itself, how beauty became business-like, how practical and streamlined it all felt. The dull buzz of the clippers — so similar to a tattoo gun, another device I've tried in vain to use to reify myself — the chatter of clients, the smells of soap and antiseptic and pomade and styling wax. I was never in the shop longer than twenty minutes; once, a particularly efficient barber had me out the door in just ten.
Every time it felt like an affirmation. That yes, this was the fate I had chosen. Every time it felt like I was saying to myself, yes, this is my life, this is the right one. I loved how clean it felt to leave with a fresh cut, feeling soft and new and reborn, a few little hairs clinging to the back of my shirt — I loved those too. After all, who are we without our choices? Who are we without the decisions we make? For those months, especially the early ones where I kept my hair short and velvet-soft and tight, it felt as though I was literally shaping myself. Making and remaking who I wanted to be, who could also be the person I am becoming.
Maybe it's funny that in making a decision I'd hoped was ascetic and internal, I ended up mostly considering and reconsidering the way I present myself from the outside in. I wanted my interior to change, for my broken heart to un-break and for my resolve to strengthen; I wanted to become from within like something that turns blessed and holy and pure all on its own. Think a peony blooming in the spring; think a lotus growing out of mud. But instead I turned my gaze towards the way I move through the world, considering for the first time in a long time if I truly knew what I wanted.
There are a lot of decisions made for us. Some of them are things we didn't get to choose, like the circumstances we were born into or the people we're drawn to or what makes our hearts beat fast. But there are some that were made for us long ago, and some that we might have chosen when we were young — like how to move through the world, whether as dandelion or flame or smooth river-stone. And those, I think, are ones worth interrogating.
Recently I realised that since I shaved my head, I've gotten to experience something that I've never experienced before. I've had to consider what I hadn't considered before, now that something as simple as a hairstyle can't be accomplished without a lot of waiting. I set my slate back to zero, though perhaps not in the way I originally intended. But now what I have — the freedom I have, the freedom I have built and continue to build — is the ability to make decisions. To cut, to shear, to grow it out. To start at zero and question — and question deeply — where I want to go from this new beginning.
Now, my haircuts aren't quite as satisfyingly efficient as the barbershop excursions I used to pride myself on. I started growing my hair out again after the winter had passed, about six months after I'd first gone for the big buzzcut. It's not always a revelation, not the way it once was, and I still find myself grappling with whether I'm really happy with how I look or not. Sometimes I feel uneven. Sometimes I wonder if I'll wake up one morning and do it all again, shear the hair back down to the skin. But I know, now, that it is a choice to keep going.
When you turn on a light, a room stays the same. It's not as though anything in it has changed from when it was in darkness; it's that now you see where everything is placed.
You strip a girl bare and she's still who she was. There's nothing simpler than being yourself. Lately, I've been running into people who knew me four or five years ago. They never fail to recognise me, and that surprises me — that beneath all of this I had a face, that it hasn't changed, that I'm still subject to enclosure within that wire-thin loop of the self. That no matter how hard I try to escape, I'm still here.
But it makes sense. I was never an empty room. It wasn't that I had to leave it all behind — but how incredible to be able to choose, to say, this is who I am.