By the time that I was sixteen and going into my junior year of high school my hair had grown longer than I’d ever had it. Almost all the way down to the spot where my shirt met my pants, my hair was not only long but also enormous, thick, and incredibly unruly. Looking at my yearbook photo from that year, it’s clear that my hair was the star of the show because it takes up so much of the frame. I’d been growing my hair out for years and it showed: the big chunk that I’d bleached for fun was still there along with three and a half inches of regrowth. The last two inches of my hair was fried and crunchy from the constant exposure to chlorine as a result of daily swim team practices.
At a certain point, that I think every single person has had regardless of hairstyle, I got tired of this huge mess of hair that I had to carry around every day. I didn’t like the way that it looked even when I put some effort into it and spent the two hours it took to curl or straighten it. It had become my trademark though, and had been one of the reasons that my boyfriend had been attracted to me in the first place. I had always wanted to cut all my hair off but was so sure that there was no way I could pull off a pixie cut so I settled for a ten inch lob to my shoulder and, let me tell you, it was the worst decision ever.
Not only was this haircut not really what I wanted but it was even more difficult to style and manage. I could fit it into a ponytail to then put into my swim cap during practice, making the almost two hour long practices miserable because I had to keep taking my cap on and off to readjust all my hair back inside of it. It didn’t look the way I wanted it to because I was too afraid to take the plunge and get the daring haircut that, at the time, basically no girl had with the exception of my future college roommate who looked so good with it. It was daunting.
So I let my hair grow out again for the entirety of senior year, took my senior pictures with long hair, and committed to a college with long hair. Directly after graduating high school, however, I decided that if there was ever a time to completely change your look, this had to be it. I made an appointment to chop all of my hair off two weeks in advance, just in case I changed my mind. My Pinterest became fully centered on pixie cuts and all the fun things you can do with them. When I finally got the haircut, my friend Sarah that I brought with me was more nervous about it than I was and documented the whole thing on Snapchat. I felt like a new person, a more empowered person, and no one could bring me down.
The success that I had with this hairstyle is a testament to how ridiculous the feeling of “not being able to pull off” any certain style is to me. I have a very particular face and I’m not even five feet tall, so to me, getting a short haircut seemed like it would automatically make me look like a little boy, but it didn’t. I’ve had almost every haircut in the book, both good and bad. Every type of bangs that you could possibly imagine, I’ve had. Every length or layers, style, what have you, I’ve definitely dealt with at one point or another and, if I’m being totally honest, I don’t think that any one of them looked so bad that I’d never want to do it again. Sure, I had no idea how to style some of them so they didn’t look great, but there came a point in my life after messing with my hair so much that I realized how little my feeling good about myself had to do with my hair.
The first time that I got a pixie cut was amazing. I went away to college, joined a sorority, the whole nine yards. I barely wore any make up and almost never dressed up for anything back then because that’s just how confident I felt. Around Christmas break of my sophomore year in college, after growing my hair back out to shoulder length, I was coming to terms with my unhappiness and felt like if I cut my hair all off again I’d regain all confidence the confidence I had lost and go back to being as sure of myself as I had been the year previous. That’s not what happened, though. Sure, I still loved the haircut and thought it looked good but my outlook on life hadn’t changed at all. I still took an hour and a half to get ready in the morning because I changed my outfits to many times and took the time to put makeup on more often than not.
I had to realize that my haircut or hairstyle didn’t define anything about me except for in hindsight to define a certain moment in time. Now, a year and a half after that second time I had a pixie cut, my hair is longer than it has been since high school and I still don’t know how I feel about it. My new obsession as far as hairstyles go is shaving my head. I’m sure one day I’ll do it because I know that it won’t completely define me. I know that I could pull it off because anyone can pull off any hairstyle; they just have to have the courage to do it. No person should limit the way they want to look because they’re afraid of looking bad. Hair grows back, dye fades and grows out, and yes, even though it feels impossible, bangs do eventually grow out too. My journey through hairstyles has taught me a lot about myself and I’m grateful because I never would’ve found any of it out if I hadn’t had the courage to let my roommate drunkenly cut my bangs that one time or dyed my hair pink when I was in eighth grade.
If you want to cut your hair off, please do it! If you want hair down to the floor, please grow it out! But don’t ever make a decision based off an arbitrary conclusion that it’s going to define you in one way or another because that’s not your hair’s responsibility; it’s yours. And last, but certainly no least, don’t ever think that you can’t pull something off. With a good enough attitude, you can pull off anything.
