It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person having a mental breakdown must be in want of a new hairstyle. Everyone has, at least once, impulsively cut bangs or bleached their hair or shaved it all off—and if you haven’t, I envy your mental health and fortitude.
If you can’t tell, I’m in the market for a haircut. After months of growing it out, trying out something longer, I’ve booked an appointment for this weekend. Whether that booking was prompted by the state of my mind or the state of the mop-like mess atop it is up for debate.
What is this phenomenon—this primal urge to change that overtakes us when we are going through the mud? As is customary in my generation, instead of deliberating this question myself, I took to Reddit and Quora to hear other people’s opinions on the matter. The overwhelming majority answered the obvious: changing our hair is an act of reclaiming self-control.
If I had read my impulse buy of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, I would be able to eloquently articulate how hair, like other parts of the body, holds trauma—and that by cutting it off or changing it, we are removing this trauma. But my copy is currently collecting dust somewhere in my childhood bedroom.
I did, however, recently rewatch Disney’s Tangled (arguably the company’s best 3D animated feature) and, spoiler alert, while I agree with the shared online devastation over how short Flynn cut Rapunzel’s hair, I found it really isn’t about that. In the most obvious, fictionalised example of this reclamation of one’s life, it’s never about what Rapunzel looks like after, rather, it’s the mere act of change that is groundbreaking.
When I participated in the World’s Greatest Shave, I had various friends and family members reposting my donation link to Facebook to encourage others to donate and explain why it was such a sacrifice for me. My mum encapsulated it best: “To know Fletcher is to know his hair.” Throughout my short life, I’ve had plenty of hairstyles—I love to try new things—and infamously amongst my circle, during the turbulent tweens, I had an awfully heaped side fringe that I wouldn’t let the hairdresser touch. “You can cut everything but the fringe,” I would angstily instruct. I used to swoop it to the side and tuck it behind my ear so often that those actions became unanimously identified by my peers as Fletcher-isms. “Very Justin Bieber,” my older relatives would say, who, I would retort, “just didn’t get it.” How very emo.
All of that is to explain how, when I shaved my head, I lost a part of my identity. Obviously not a sizeable comparison to the cancer patients or those with alopecia who struggle with hair loss for much longer periods or permanently—but I learned a lot about vanity during that brief time and I think everyone should shave their hair at least once in their life.
Further into high school, I wrote a severely under-researched discursive essay about the importance of haircuts which I’ve aptly stolen the title of for this article. Yes, for some, a haircut is just a haircut. But for those of us whose image is intrinsically linked to our identity—a difficult feat to escape in an age of camera phones, social media and a plethora of reflective surfaces—a haircut is much, much more.
It reveals to us who we are, who we want to be. Our reference images: our aspirations. The mirror: a portal into the next world. The difference between the before and the after—the beforelife and the afterlife, perhaps.
Plus, hair can have deep cultural significance. My grandfather once shared with me how, in some Native American tribes, our sense of direction comes from our hair. He told me that when the First World War drafted in the US, native soldiers were conscripted as trackers because of this trait—but when it came time to track on unfamiliar country, they couldn’t do it properly because their hair had been shaved off in line with military protocols. In the deepest sense, they were intrinsically linked to their hair.
Have you heard India.Arie Simpson’s song, “I Am Not My Hair?”
Now that I’ve booked my appointment, I’m actually starting to like the length of my mop-like mess. Call it preemptive buyer’s remorse, call it the first stage of grief, call it what you want. It might eventuate in order envy, it might (100% will) cause some tears in the mirror but I know it’ll end the way it always does—in acceptance. I’ll look back in a couple of months on the old style and laugh at how big of a fuss I made. Maybe the five stages of change are the same as the five stages of grief. Aren’t we grieving the loss of a once familiar version of ourselves when we change? Aren’t we grieving the loss of our hair when we cut it?
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If you’re looking for a great hairdresser near the ECU Mount Lawley campus, may I suggest Hair on Fitz. Not only have I found them to be more student budget-friendly than nearby salons, the team is wonderfully talented and personable. They always know exactly what I want after I show them twenty completely different Pinterest reference photos—and they execute it flawlessly. I’ve been a loyal customer for the past three years—they’ve seen me through my slim shady blonde buzzcut to my brunette nineties middle part. I can’t wait to see what they’ll help me achieve next.