Hairstory
I often find myself standing in front of a mirror, scissors in hand. I find a thrill in the terror, a high in the exhilaration. I crave to be made new again. These years, I carry a pair of scissors with me wherever I go. I never know when the itch will find me… though it often comes like a reaper in the night.
Once, I was a baby with black hair and bangs to frame. I always come back to that version. Sometimes I think it’s the real me, the Megan with five names, more than half of which are Vietnamese, underneath the Mei I have crafted.
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When I was fifteen, I dated a boy. My hair was long and beautiful, and I thought I was in love. I was born with a head of hair so thick that people stopped my mother in the grocery store to ask if she was carrying a babydoll…at least that’s how I remember her telling it to me. At the unripe age of eight, my sister and I fought over whose hair was darker. We wanted to buy braided hair headbands at Walgreens. I argued that my hair was black-brown and hers was brown-black. The differentiation mattered then and still matters to me now, though her hair now grows lighter as mine grows darker. The order of the words carried the weight of a mixed identity we both wanted a larger claim to.
At fifteen, my hair was streaked with the highlights I’d worn like flag stripes since I was thirteen. Something changed between the ages of eight and thirteen. I think the change looked like a nearly all-white Catholic school with its dark basement halls and close-knit classrooms that never seemed to know how to make room for a spare thread.
On a blurry winter day of the year I turned sixteen, I had flowers in a jar on my windowsill. One ripe and two still shy in their closed buds. It was February 5th, and I wore my Lunar New Year’s red. I had beautiful hair that waved like a hello. It hung halfway down my back, long in the way I had let it be for some years. That year, when the ball dropped on the other side of the country, I was sitting in an airport while rumours about my boyfriend and another girl ran like a rampant horse out of an open gate. But February 5th was a chance for a new beginning. Vietnamese people are notoriously superstitious, and I don’t know what parts were culture and which parts were my own imaginations running wild, but I was always told to spend New Year's how I wanted to spend the rest of the year. The house was supposed to be clean, and I was supposed to wear red, receive money, and surround myself with the people I wanted in the new year. I was also supposed to cut my hair. It was only later I’d learn that you were supposed to cut it before New Year's Day or you’d cut off all your luck.
I’ve been a spontaneous person for longer than I knew that word applied to me. When I was young, my mother would call it hasty. As an adult, I would say the world moved too slowly for the certainty with which I needed to take action. On February 5th, the greeting of a new year of possibilities was edged with the desperate itch for a goodbye. Looking back with the illuminated wisdom of adulthood, I think my intuition knew something that my mind wasn’t ready to accept yet.
At the age of fifteen, I was new to the world of making adult decisions. I had just gotten my first job and saved up my money for the hasty decision I was about to make. My usual hair artist, as I’d call him, was fully booked, so I decided to take my money to whoever was available to accept my appointment. I’ll spare you the gory details of how my naivety was taken advantage of, but I left that day robbed of my hard-earned $350 and my long, beautiful hair.
That night, I walked into the Hyatt hotel to see my boyfriend and friends for dinner. Though my hair now blew in the bare space above my shoulders and shone bright silver, my boyfriend didn’t notice. Lunar New Year's 2019 ended in heartbreak I couldn’t accept and split ends I had to.
I never could marry that silver-haired version of me to my self-identity. It was like a foreign flag waving from the top of my head. I never knew how fragile I was until I had to take dead pieces of myself and lay them to rest.
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When I was eighteen, my identity was a costume I was still trying on. Though I was terrified of needles, a few temporary tattoos convinced me to make them permanent, and my hair was long once again, but this time it was a shiny curtain of velvety red. This time I had gone to my hair artist, and he steered me in a direction I didn’t know I needed.
After greeting coloured hair dye and a new city for the first time, I eventually found myself coming home to the version of me that looked so much like the baby my parents once knew. My hair was long and black, with bangs to frame, and I moved into the Asian dorms at my new university. In college, in a new state, I found the spectrum of Wasians and Asian-Americans that my Midwest and Southern towns had never told me about. For a while, I felt like I had found my place.
But the black dye began to fade, and heartbreak was no match for the fragile girl I once was. Between September and December of that year, my hair knew every length from ribcage to chin, and every colour from pink and black to turquoise and orange. My double-bed dorm smelled of bleach at least once a week, and I treated college like a runway. By December, I had a new nose piercing, four tattoos, and chin-length turquoise hair. I also had a new boyfriend.
I loved the shifting rainbow on my head. I liked knowing there were infinite versions of myself that I had yet to meet, infinite versions I could find at the bottom of my gallon of bleach. For months, I felt like a beautiful peacock.
Looking back, I think I was lost and trying to find myself inside by exploring who I was on the outside. That new boyfriend didn’t seem to like it. He only liked my hair when it was long and black, when I was easy to label and fit into a perfect picture.
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By the age of twenty, I should have learned my lesson with heartbreak. I was exploring my queer identity in new ways that the narrow box I had learned from hadn’t told me about. My tumultuous last relationship left me with all questions and no answers.
Looking back now, I see how he made me feel unsafe, like an object for use and discard. It made me feel so broken and violated inside my own head that I wanted to be anything other than me. So I tried to reject my femininity as if it would save me from feeling like a thing instead of a person.
At twenty, I met someone who I’m not sure I could say if I was attracted to or not, but they let me down in a way that a more well-adjusted person would have brushed off. I, however, was still fresh off the plane from another continent and drowning in a self-worth tied to how others treated me. And so, I begged the scissors to take the pain away and make me new again. I think now of the pool of my dying past that I stood in, memories falling to the floor where they’d be taken out with the trash like they were nothing.
I think I needed to shed the pain that my last relationship had brought me, the version of me that felt violated inside. I cut my hair because I could not yet change who I was, but still, I needed to be new again, and for a week, I was new. And for every other week after that, I was a woman I’d never met before with hair cut above her ears. Six months later, I spent what most students would consider a small fortune, a price that had to be paid to heal a version of me that I needed to break to move on. So I got hair extensions, I healed from the ugly truths I hid about my past relationship, and I relearned how to embrace my extravagant femininity. I felt like me again, although perhaps a slightly performed version.
Looking back at being twenty and cutting my hair, I see now that it freed me. For the first time in my life, I walked in the shoes of not being conventionally ‘pretty’. I learned to find the love that I needed without the approval of others.
I wonder now why I am continually unable to accept the version of me that is different when I so often crave to be made new again. Why do I always come back to the version of me with long, black hair and bangs to frame?
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Just a few breaths away from twenty-three now, my hair is once again long and black, with bangs to frame. My scissors live in my makeup bag, falling to the floor with each unzip like an old friend reaching out a hand, and I’ve found people who love me and my hair through every stage, people who hand me the scissors and mix the bleach when the itch comes crawling back, but that’s not the point of the story.
As a child, I never had a say in my own fate. I was a paper boat in the North Sea. As a teenager, I moved around the furniture in my room every few months. I changed my wardrobe and wore miles into the tires of my '99 Nissan. I think I tried to take back my sense of control, but by then, I was already addicted to the change that I was subjected to in my youth. As an adult, I move countries, I clean out everything I own, and I change jobs. For the longest time, I thought I was running from something. In truth, maybe I’ve been trying to run to something all along. My identity has been a cracked desert floor for as many years as I can remember, and I’ve filled the empty spaces with change, and so it seems, hair. I cut my hair because I cannot change who I am inside. I need to be new again. I’ve spent so long chasing belonging, craving an identity that was mine, and I’m still looking, but I think I’m getting closer. Maybe it was never about the hair I cut off, but about the power of getting to be the scissors, to be the omnipotent hand that dealt my own fate.