I’ve been trying to grow out my hair since I can remember. When I was growing up, I had super short, Shirley Temple, fuzzball, curly hair. My mother loved plucking at each of the spirals, and boinging them against my scalp. The look was great when I was 2, 3, 4 years old, but soon I was 9, 10, 11 years old, and what were once soft bounces against my head became a frizzy source of anxiety for me. So I kept growing it out and out until it tumbled over my shoulders and down my back.

I am terrified of hairdressers, I feel trapped in the chair that is slowly pumped up and suffocated by the black smock that transforms me into nothing but a floating head.

But I needed to cut my hair.

First and foremost, my hair felt like someone had ironed straw and glued it to my scalp. It had been so long since I had cut my hair that people thought I had ombre (when it was just majority dead heads turning the ends of my hair blonde). Brushing my hair was becoming an increasingly difficult task marked by the pain of feeling my hair torn from my scalp as it became tangled in the bristles of my brush.

Second of all, I wanted to cut my hair. For so long, my hair has been such a defining factor in how I perceived myself, my own beauty and worth. As I was growing up, I found strength, confidence and autonomy in my choice to grow out my hair. However, I was adopting the standards of beauty around me instead of thinking about what that meant for myself. People were horrified when I told them. They would lament loosing my curls, and they said it may never grow back, that my hair was so much a part of who I was and how I looked. These were all things that prevented me from representing myself in a way that was fair for me for most of my teen years. As I age into adulthood, I understand what it is that defines why I am and I’ve recognized the ways in which my standards of beauty are discordant with those around me.

So I cut off my hair. I couldn’t tell you how many inches it was, and when I was sitting there listening to the sound of the snapping blades, I felt relaxed and liberated. In truth, my hair still aligns within the standards of cis-hetero feminine beauty that exist around me, and now I wish I had cut it even shorter. Next time, maybe I’ll chop my hair so that it just grazes my jawline, just to see what it's like. Hey, it's just hair, it'll grow back.