I’ll always remember my first real haircut: not the one you get because your split ends are starting to reach your roots, but the one you choose – the big one. I was 11 years old and my grandmother had decided that, this time, I would be going to her hairdresser: usually I just went to the place across the street from our house. Excited, I sat down and told him, as usual, that I wanted my hair to get to the back of my neck.
On the one hand, I guess he really was a better hairdresser than the one I used to go to. On the other, when you expect a shoulder-length cut and your hair suddenly doesn’t go past the crook of your neck, it’s a pretty big shock, especially when your bat mitsva is coming up in a couple of months and you look like a ninja (no, really, and I have photos to prove it).
That’s probably why it took me ten years before I decided to give The Haircut a go again. When I mentioned to my mother a month before that I wanted to cut my hair short, her first response was to shrug and smile. Then she told me something I never thought I’d hear from her:
“You know, men don’t like women with short hair”.
This was all the more shocking given the fact that my mother has sported a bright red pixie cut for as long as I can remember. But as I thought about what she had told me, I realised she didn’t mean it as a bad thing.
Starting around the time of that traumatising haircut, I went through all of the stages of teenage and came out of it with a pretty shaken sense of self-esteem – I don’t know many girls who grew up in the golden age of Giselle and came out fully unscathed. We have been subjected to so much pressure that it was hard to reflect on my own image without thinking about others’ opinions: hell, I’m a 21 year-old who asked her mom whether she should get a haircut!
But what my mom replied was exactly what I needed to hear: she told me fuck it, cut your hair if you want to. Don’t listen to your dad who tells you he prefers you like this, don’t mind that guy you went on a date with once and who told you he found short hair less attractive (in fairness, given her own hairstyle, I'm not sure it was an entirely unbiased opinion)
So I took a day off two weeks ago, just before the New Year (just in case it went badly, so that I could blame it on 2016), booked myself an 11am appointment at my hairdresser’s, and strode in declaring that I wanted it all gone. Ironically, this is also my mother’s hairdresser and he reacted as someone who had known me since I ran out of my grandmother’s salon a decade ago: he asked whether I was sure and, when I replied in the affirmative, firmly took a hold of my hair and chopped it all off.
It's been just over 6 months since I took that decision and, a lot of self-love and so much less hassle in the shower later, I can definitely say I'm proud of it.