To All the Haircuts I've Loved Before

& all the ways they've helped me love myself

So much of who I’ve been and who I’ve become can be traced back through my hair. I was a ballerina, with a braided topknot and a crown made of tinsel. I was a tomboy, romping through the woods with my dad in a backwards camo baseball cap. I was a confused teenager, sitting on a queer friend’s floor dying my hair for the first time. I was a sorority girl who tried to bleach the memories out of that hair. I am my mother’s daughter, with hair made to shine auburn the way that hers does in the sun. I am free - freer than I’ve ever been, from societal pressures and the expectations of ‘flattering’ - with hair that barely brushes my chin.

I don’t know what my next cut will be. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to my natural color. I am certain that the endless opportunities for change are comforting, especially when I take a moment to reflect on all the versions of myself I’ve learned to love.

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The first haircut I coveted was a short bob with the bottoms flipped out. I don’t remember where I first saw it, but I knew that I wanted it. My mom warned me that it would mean curling the bottoms each morning, but I didn’t care. I’ve always hated styling my hair, too antsy for it to be done and too much of a perfectionist to be fully satisfied, but it never deterred me from the big changes I thought would rid me of my discomfort. There’s always been a tightness under my skin. An itch, an impatience, a sense that there is something not quite right. That first big haircut wasn’t the right one (my mom was right; I never let her curl it, aside from picture day) but it was a step in the right direction.

I cut my bangs with kitchen scissors before I was tall enough to see myself in the mirror. In most of the photos I’ve scrounged up from my childhood, I have salon-fixed blunt cut bangs hiding my forehead and long straight hair.

A black and white photo of Autumn as a child at a dance recital. She has blunt cut bangs and hair in a braided topknot. She is wearing a leotard and tutu, and she has her arms above her head.

As I entered middle school, though, the narrative around my hair changed. I started considering what was flattering. The word consumed me. I learned my face shape - round - in the context of hair. Short hair and bangs would accentuate this shape, I was told, and that was bad. Flattering was the stepping stone onto a path of self loathing from which I’m still trying to reroute.

The pursuit of flattering hair guided me further into femininity, like bread crumbs leading to a gender conforming trap. I kept my hair long to hide the curves of my cheeks. I rarely wore it up for the same reason, only pulling it back into a ponytail while playing sports. Still, I fought my hair, never fully satisfied. I spent an entire year crimping it, the long brown strands resembling crinkle cut french fries cooked a little too long. I knew I wanted to look different than the girls around me, but it wasn’t for familiar reasons. It wasn’t envy or a desire to stand out, and I definitely don’t think it was a trend. I don’t remember my childhood well, so I can’t say for certain what made me wake up early before school every day, singeing my finger tips while drowsily clamping strands of hair into frizzy zigzags. I think it was the same feeling that drew me to that first big chop: a desire to see myself.

In high school, I discovered box dye. The first time I dyed my hair, I sat on the floor of my best friend’s bedroom while they ran the inky, dark brown dye through my hair. They smeared vaseline along the edges of my face to keep it from staining, thumbs gentle as they swept along my hairline. It was my freshman or sophomore year, and my favorite band was Sleeping with Sirens; theirs was Pierce the Veil. Together, we bought tickets to Warped Tour and listened to boys with long hair whine into mics. I wore chunky rubber wristbands and tees with my favorite bands’ names on them, and my mom asked me if I was certain listening to Bring Me The Horizon at full blast wasn’t making my headaches worse. If there was ever a time to color my hair too many shades darker, going through two boxes of dye from Walmart, it was that year.

By the time the color had long since grown out of my hair, that friend would come out as trans. We had grown apart, two closeted queer teens too lost in our own traumas to communicate properly, unable to fully understand ourselves or each other. I started lashing out as my pain got worse, and I hadn’t yet accepted that it couldn’t be fixed by someone just loving me enough. It means something, though, that the first big change I made to my hair without the permission of a stylist’s chair was done on a queer person’s bedroom floor. That friend, though they will likely never know it, emboldened me to keep searching for the versions of myself that felt good and right and exciting. It certainly wasn’t that hair color - which made me look unearthly pale - but it was the first style that gave me the confidence to keep trying.

That friendship and box dye faded, and I kept running towards classic femininity in pursuit of comfort. I imagined that the voice in my head would be silenced by time spent curling my hair in new ways or putting on a new shade of lipstick. There were different box dyes, and I was fond of dark cherry brown for a while. And then, of course, blonde knocked at my door.

It started with blonde tips. Ombre was newly popular, so I kept my natural light brown shade and experimented with a style that faded to a brassy gold. It wasn’t a great color, but it was often hidden anyways, painstakingly slicked back into high buns and ponytails while I moonlighted as a dancer and cheerleader. This is the hair I carried through my senior year, into the summer and my move to Arizona. The color grew out as I spent a year in the desert, drinking cheap liquor and trying to squeeze myself into a sorority girl shaped mold. My focus shifted away from my hair, picking apart the other things I could change about myself. The girls around me wore Kendra Scott necklaces and Tory Burch sandals. They wore heels and mini dresses to events, so I wore heels and mini dresses to events. I was miserable, and I was constantly uncomfortable - the heat of the desert suffocating and the expectations I had for myself even more so. When I look at pictures from those years, I don’t recognize myself, but I do recognize the urge to crawl out of my skin.

I left Arizona in a haze, torn between the unmoored feeling of never laying down roots and the sense that I would be haunted by the memories etched into my skull forever. I packed my bags and signed a lease in Ann Arbor, imagining that a new state and a new school could be a fresh start. The Midwest was home, and I believed the University of Michigan could become that too. When it failed to deliver on that promise, when I found myself fighting to leave the apartment, spending more and more time melting into my bed and hiding from reality, I searched for feeling in the only place I had always been able to find it: a salon chair.

In 2018, I learned that I could bleach my hair but I couldn’t bleach my memories. This is the first big hair change that can be found on my Instagram feed if you scroll far enough. I was blonde when I went on my last date with a man. I was blonde when I was forced to drop out of school. I was blonde when I read my first queer book and started coming out to myself. The color never quite suited me. I made too many jokes about blondes supposedly having more fun, when I certainly wasn’t, and I wasted hours waiting for purple shampoo to tone it to cooler shades. With each trip to the stylist, I asked for the color to be lighter, until one day I went home with silver hair. It was bolder, edgier than I had ever gone, and it felt like a protective layer between my wounded underbelly and the world. With icy enough hair, I imagined, I could reclaim control.

Autumn as a blonde in her late teens, early twenties. She is at a concert, has long platinum blonde hair, and is wearing dark maroon lipstick and a black v neck top.

I moved to Minnesota, I got a full time job as an administrative assistant, and I let go of the blonde, which came with expensive upkeep. I trimmed my hair, dying it closer to its original shade of brown, and spent the early years of the pandemic slowly losing my mind. Working a toxic job, unable to work remotely and keep myself safe, spending the holidays alone - the only thing I could manage to do with my hair was spontaneously (and horribly) box dye it over my bathroom sink. I don’t remember the color, only that it would take years for it to fully leave my hair. What I do remember is getting into a fight with a stranger on the internet about it. They told me I was ruining my hair, and I got defensive because it felt like everything had already been ruined. I was trapped in a job that overworked me and didn’t view me as fully human. I couldn’t see my family, but I saw coworkers who refused to mask every day. Making a bad hair decision was truly the least of my worries.

The years between that decision and now are blurry. The years between most of these hair decisions and now even more so. At some point, I finally found a local stylist who I started paying too much to yap my ear off about whether or not I’d found a boyfriend yet. It was worth it though, because together, we found the perfect shade of auburn that I’ve kept for the last couple years. It makes me look like my mom, and the first time I saw it, I felt a little bit more like myself.

Still, I refused to cut my hair any shorter than a trim. I wanted to. I craved the freedom of short hair. I was sick of the dizzy spells that came every time I tried to wash it, and most of the time, I had to sit down on the slick shower floor, exhausted by the task. The length bothered me, always in the way, always brushing my shoulders and neck and making my nerve pain worse. Even when I started wearing it up every day, I didn’t let myself consider chopping it off.

Short hair just isn’t flattering on round faces.

I started bargaining with myself. If I lost enough weight, if my jaw got pronounced enough, I could try a short style. I took screenshots of pictures online and started a photo album on my phone. I talked to everyone I knew about it, silently hoping that someone would give me permission to take the leap. Every time I got close, though, I Googled ‘the best haircuts for round faces’ and was reminded that short hair just wasn’t in the cards.

Those articles are stupid. They suggest layers to “create the illusion of angles” or hair long enough to “elongate the face.” I spent a decade dreaming of short hair and was conned into not trying it by articles that offer suggestions on ways to make my face not look like my face.

What is so wrong about my face? Why have I spent my entire life desperately searching for ways to hide or change or mask it?

Autumn in her mid-twenties, smiling with her hands in her pockets in front of a wall with white siding. She is wearing a boxy black shirt, wire rim glasses, and has auburn hair in a chin length bob. She looks comfortable and happy.

This year, I finally cut my hair, and then I cut it shorter and shorter again. Showering is easier; I don’t have to sit down anymore. When I catch a glimpse of myself in a window or mirror, I don’t feel that same discomfort. I feel freer, lighter - not just literally but internally too. The curves of my cheeks are on full display, and I don’t have anywhere to hide.

One of the best things I’ve done is let go of the pursuit of flattering in exchange for the pursuit of comfort. I refuse to be consumed by anxieties surrounding the ways that society perceives me. I don’t need to be a perfect 10 to be loved. I don’t need to hide my cheeks to be attractive. I don’t need to continue forcing myself into molds that don’t fit to be fulfilled.

Embracing my queerness, exploring my gender, and accepting my disability has transformed my worldview in so many ways, and a big part of that has been this newfound pursuit of comfort. Being a part of these communities is not based on desirability or the cut of my hair; it stems from the deepest parts of who I am, so why would I ever try to dampen that?

I wish I had something deeply profound to leave you with, but here are the reminders I needed to hear one, five, ten years ago:

You do not need to lose weight to cut your hair. If there is a haircut you want, you do not need to Google whether it will be flattering on you. If it makes you happy, if it emboldens you to dress and act and flirt and play in new, exciting ways, you should try it.

People will love you even when you hate your hair. People will love you because you are kind, generous, thoughtful, witty, gentle, brilliant, and warm. People will love you because you share your favorite recipes and book recommendations with them. They will love the sound of your laugh and your name popping up on their phone. No one cares as much about the reflection in the mirror as you do. I promise.

So, for all the time I spent waxing poetic and reflecting about all of the ways my hair has looked, try to remember that it’s just hair. At the end of the day, it’s all about how you feel in it.

Young Autumn wearing camo pants and a camo baseball cap, bends towards the ground and points at something. She has long brown hair, is holding her wooden child-sized longbow, and is wearing pink sneakers.

P.S. Long live baseball cap Autumn. That’s the me I’ve always recognized and loved most.