So I’ve had A TON of physical anxiety bullshit lately. After extensive consideration and some long nights of thinking-while-sleeping, I realized that my anxiety is in large part caused by my hair.
(”read more” for long post)
I’m completely serious. To offer a quick summary: I recently learned I am autistic/Asperger’s/ASD (pick your terminology) which has helped me to understand why I react in certain ways to physical sensory input. (People on the autism spectrum commonly experience sensory input in different, often extremely intensified ways.) This stuff generally does not affect or impair my daily life like it can for other individuals in more severe sensory cases, but some things can really eat away at me over time. Like, the sound of quiet dripping water, or uneven/artificial lighting, or if a TV is on when I’m going to sleep (even if it’s quiet and in the other end of the house), or if the tiny light on my computer is blinking. Stuff like that might as well be someone screaming directly into my ear or shining a spotlight in my face.
So, hair. I don’t consider myself a “long hair” person. In a perfect world I’d have a very short haircut, somewhere between a sparse bob and a straight-up buzz depending on the season, and for many years that’s exactly what I did. But back when I started getting healthy I decided to grow my hair out. Objectively speaking, I have really nice hair. It’s super thick, strong, soft, and a lovely mix of chocolatey browns with strands of copper and gold. I love my hair and the idea of this hair… but not on me. If I saw it on someone else, I’d be like OMGOSH SUCH HAIR VERY WOW. So I decided, after exhausting my supervisors’ patience with my buzzcut and mini-mohawk a few years back, that I was growing it out so I could shave it all off *someday* and donate it for kids’ cancer wigs or something equally charitable and nice. I mean, it just grows out of my head, right? Renewable resource. No effort on my part.
But the longer it gets and the longer I wait, the more it fucks with me. It doesn’t *feel right* on my head. Every day I brush it and braid it and twist it up and pull it back, and it feels like a foreign object attached to my scalp. It’s always coming undone in the gym, which is not just aggravating on a functional level, but also confusing on a subconscious/sensory level because I reflexively feel like that hair is not part of me, I’m not emotionally connected to it in any way and it doesn’t “need” to be on my head. I feel it all the time. Some little part of my brain is incapable of accepting it or alternately ignoring it.
Going even deeper than that, it’s created some…. …..I’m gonna call it “gender anxiety”. After realizing that I am quite comfortable with the idea of people using gender-neutral pronouns when talking about me (which is an entirely separate discussion for a different post on a different day), I spent, like, a ton of time stressing out re: my sense of gender (not that it matters all that much, but I suddenly noticed I wasn’t as “sure” as I had assumed I was). Long anxious semi-dysphoric consideration period later, I settled upon the conclusion that the anxiety in that particular quarter is coming from the fact that having long, pretty hair puts pressure on me to “perform” a version of femininity that I really do not relate to. Whether that pressure is internal or external is somewhat a moot point, and I’m still working on it, but the tl;dr is that I don’t feel as “pretty” as people tell me I look with long hair and that being a “pretty young woman with lovely long tresses” is highly incongruent with my preferred expression of my gender identity, which if nothing else makes me just kinda grumpy all the time.
Whew. But seriously, if my head was shaved right now I literally 100% believe I’d be doing better in BJJ, not on the verge of tears in Muay Thai, writing more easily in school, generally just feeling more like “me”. It wouldn’t solve all the problems, but it’d help the world seem more right and normal. I feel stupid for this being an actual thing, but it’s been harder and harder to deal with. At the very latest, all this hair will be gone in just under one year’s time. And if I can stick it out that long, it’s going to be for a very good reason. In the meantime, I think I could even learn to enjoy it for what it is… like, the upkeep is awful but I can do some really interesting things with it. We’ll see.