I Cut my Hair to Reveal Myself

The Canadian Blog Contributor, Before.

I hadn't had my hair cut or coloured in awhile.

So I finally went to see John at Axis Salon in Sinclair Center because i heard he did a wicked blond and sat in the chair and declaring exuberantly "make me platinum!''To which he promptly replied in not quite so many words 'Hell no girl! Your hair will fall out, this fucking red will never ever lift. I can make the roots blond but unless you wanna cut it all off..."

He proceeded to shear the red hair down to my nipples into a pixie cut,  revealing my virgin and fledgling, dirty blond locks.

I'm not really sure what made me do it. Maybe it was because my hair dresser was sexy and if he said it was gonna look good, who was i to question it? Maybe i wanted to get rid of my colour damaged hair that was begging to make me look more like Raggedy Andy then a sexy Andrea. Maybe I did because I think Eddie Sedgwick and Jean Seberg are cool ass chicks. I dunno, I went in wanting a change begging the question "when did the break up happen.?"

The Canadian Blog Contributor, After.

Yes. I'm single. For the first time in four year, i have don't have a boyfriend and it's been difficult, I'm not gonna lie. I realized that I've always been the type of girl that needs the reassurance of having a doting man in my life. And in his absence i have had to let myself out of the mind set that even if nobody loves me, i still have worth and i still count. I've done it all, revisited past relationships, made out drunkenly with strangers in dark clubs and even tried to make male friends into lovers. Just as I have hidden coyly behind my come-hither hair, i have hidden in the company of men, denying myself the catharsis of knowing myself.

Samson and Delilah, ca. 1610
Peter Paul Rubens

As my hair fell around me I began to panic. He was cutting away my femininity, my beauty, my identity. I went in with a gorgeous main that flew attractively around a dance floor and fell softly on the pillows of lovers, and left with a short hair seen on mode girls, butch lesbians and business women. I had violent flashbacks to the last time i had my hair cut short, when i was a  ,

me, age two, 1989

geeky three year old kid with coke-bottle glasses, a time when i was often mistaken for a little boy. And I though "Damn, I'll never have another boyfriend." I sat slumped and  defeated like Samson, my great tool of adornment and of the power of attraction, gone to me for now.

But as i left the salon, back to my natural colour that had been hidden for as long as i could remember, my ears and the nape of my neck turning red from the bite of the winter air, I had the most incredible sense of freedom. For the first time in years i was alone, no man and little hair. Free from hair ties and the blow dryer. No one to hold, but also no one to hold me back.