This week’s missive has existed in several different forms.
At first, I was going to talk about the fact that on a whim I just changed the entire identity of this newsletter and felt almost nothing about the change. There was no sadness at saying goodbye to the purple. There was no agonising thinking it over like there had been in the past when I was making small changes. I was just in Canva one day and thought ‘you know what I’m gonna rebrand’ and that was that.
Then I was going to talk about the fact that at the halfway point of the month, I officially gave up on a NaNo. I had a pretty lax attitude to it already but even I didn’t expect to be pulled towards a different project completely and I started writing words for that and an actual better way of keeping track of my writing progress this month is to just stick to what I was doing and use my Pacemaker plans which allow for my creativity to wander.
Then three things happened on Saturday. I got a haircut and while I was sitting there under a steamer I saw a meme that said something along the lines of ‘it’s hard to heal when your inner child wants love, your teenage self wants revenge and now you just want peace’.
Now my inner child is fine, it received plenty of love from the people that mattered and yes adult me just wants peace but it never occurred to me that teenage me wants revenge but honestly? That tracks.
Because here is the third thing that happened on Saturday. My stylist was styling my hair and about halfway through she said ‘your hair is so easy. Easy to detangle, it takes product well.’
I’m 30 years old and despite going to this salon for three years now there is still a lot of trauma rooted in getting a haircut for me.
Which started as, you guessed it, a teenager.
What is more soul crushing to a teenage girl who already knows that the mere fact that she has thick, curly hair is a political act even if it’s just hair than having her hairdresser routinely say that her hair would be better if it was straight? Actually not even necessarily straight, he couldn’t even guarantee that the chemicals would take in the way they ‘should’ so it might have actually just gone wavy. But I was being promised better. I was being promised whiter hair. I was being promised everything I wanted in a desperate attempt to make me less other. I was already too tall, too brown, too quiet, and too focused on not getting bullied for what I could never really understand, having my hair be ‘normal’ felt like it could be a win. (My mother held firm with her no. Hated her for it at the time, grateful for it now.)
Who wouldn’t find it heart breaking to be sat in a chair in your slightly damp school uniform because it rained a little bit as you walked from school to the hairdresser only to have a comb break in the middle of detangling your hair? And it couldn’t have happened quietly. No, everyone must know that my hair is so thick and quite the tangle that it broke a comb.
How is a teenage girl who is having to go through the experience of being a teenage girl supposed to feel when every time she goes to the hairdresser she is told that her split ends are atrocious and they are going to have to cut loads off so that my hair can be ‘healthy’?
The answer to all those questions is that she just internalises all the ways that her hair is wrong and then kind of gets over it but is also very quick to fall out of love with her and then do the literal bare minimum in order to make sure it isn’t dry but it also isn’t serving much purpose.
It’s just there.
Because somewhere in the back of my mind I am just thinking that this hair is bad. It’s bad. It’s bad.
Not that I realised that until Saturday afternoon. When on top of being told that my hair was easy I was also told that my split ends weren’t all that bad.
There is a link here between the fact that my hairdressers before 2020 (and also please bear in mind that I also didn’t get my haircut for something like 4 years because the whole experience was so unfun) were white. Specifically white men. Who in typical them fashion felt like they had the authority to define what beauty was and what it could be and told me the ways that I, with my ‘othered’ hair, could be better. Closer to the ‘norm’. They tried to convince me that I would be prettier if my hair was straighter. At one point I had someone almost convince me that I would be ‘stunning’ with blonde hair. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t look good blonde, but it very much feeds into the narrative that blonde is more attractive. Blonde should be the goal. I can’t be fair of skin but I can be fair of hair. Kind of.
And because they were white men and I was young and very much a passenger in their world (still kind of am, hard not to be) I believed them.
The realisation was a lot for a late afternoon on a Saturday but it also kind of felt like a release in some ways.
I am very much in the ‘just wanting peace’ thing and also revenge is tiring, who has the time? But, there is something that feels like revenge every time I don’t think about straightening my hair. Or bleaching it blonde. Wearing it in its most natural state is a form of revenge. Not apologising for the inevitable frizz is a form of revenge. Not being obsessed with keeping it tame is an act of revenge.
Right, that is me done talking about my hair for the rest of the year. It’s a great source of content because…well there is a lot of shit wrapped up in that and as I process some past shit it keeps coming up.
Here’s to achieving peace.
Jumpin’ Jumpin’
What I’m reading - I devoured Salt Kiss - Sierra Simone over the weekend and I am so desperate for the next book in the trilogy because I just love the tension and the drama and I wanna see how it unfolds. And I’m now reading the Blood of a Fae series - Briar Boleyn which I am not far enough in yet to have a solid opinion on. (it’s an affiliate link)
What I’m watching - I’m a Celeb is back, so I'm watching that.
Title Inspiration - I wanna apologise for using yet another Taylor Swift, but I’m not sorry (also kind of a Taylor Swift song). Vigilante Shit was really the only option.