Welcome to #TransTuesday! Today’s topic is a follow-up to a previous one, and is one (to my surprise!) several people have been asking me about and wanting to see recently so… here we go. HAIR PART 2: aka FIRST HAIRCUT. Of my life!
For much added context, please see my first thread on my HAIR.
And for more added context, please see my thread on the extra difficulty of A PANDEMIC TRANSITION.
All caught up? Great, here we go! (deep breaths, deep breaths) So as I mentioned in the pandemic transition thread, I had an appointment set up with a trans-friendly stylist recommended to me by my lovely, wonderful friend Barbra. And that appointment was two days ago.
SO WHAT HAPPENED? Reader, let me tell you. A week before I started getting really excited, but that so very quickly turned into utter terror. Not because I was worried about the stylist being anti-trans or anything, I trusted the recommendation.
But because I started to realize how much of myself, and my new, growing, developing sense of identity was tied up in my hair. I love how long it is. I love how nutso curly it is. It makes me feel like ME. And I was incredibly afraid of how I was going to feel afterward.
Because what if I hated it? What if the one and only thing about my physical body that I find pure and wonderful all the way through, that brings me basically no dysphoria… changed? What if it gave me MORE dysphoria?
I’ve linked to the essay on GENDER DYSPHORIA what feels like an infinite number of times, but almost everything comes back to that for me, so it’s there if you need a refresher (or if you’re new, hey, hi!).
I’m overcome with fear and sadness just thinking about it, and the appointment’s already in the past! But that’s what dysphoria does to you… you’d do almost anything to lessen it (or I would, anyway), and the thought of it somehow getting worse is utterly devastating.
Yet I had a feeling that if bangs were possible, IF if if, such a big if. But IF they were, it might make my dysphoria better, because such a large part of it for me revolves around my face. And I thought bangs might reshape it just enough to make it better.
Just sitting here typing these thoughts out I can feel my chest tightening and my pulse quickening. It hurts. And it’s already over and I know how it went! It’s such an unbelievably powerful thing, and I don’t have it half as bad as some people do.
In any case, as the day of the appointment got closer and closer, it became really hard to concentrate on or even think about anything else. It occupied almost all of my thoughts. I was so scared of coming out the other side of it closer to who I was before transitioning.
Which is a little nuts on the surface, it’s not like I was going to ask for my old buzz cut back. But I just… I don’t know. I guess my hair has become this symbol to me of the REAL me. It’s the first thing I did to transition, the first (and still only) thing to give me nearly zero dysphoria.
It’s the most ME part of me, if that makes any sense. And so anything that might make it feel less like ME meant moving me back toward the costumed shadow of a human I used to be. And when I tell you that feels like the water’s back to drown me in misery again…
Not only do I not want to go back to the shell that wasn’t me, I can’t. I CANNOT. It feels like it would crush the life out of me. It would crush the ME out of me, and that happened for too long.
I can’t let the me who never got to BE go through that. I won’t. So I was just an emotional wreck. The nerves were really hard to deal with. And yet they were super familiar, because I’ve been there before. A lot.
The first time I put on a dress. The first time I put on makeup. The first time I came out to Susan, to our kid, to my friends, to the world. The first time I stepped outside dressed as ME and not in a very poor “this is what cis guys look and act like, right?” costume.
And knowing the fear seemed insurmountable at those times, and yet I did it anyway, got me through. If I did it then, I could do it now. No, I don’t know what’s going to happen… it could be bad, but it could be GREAT. Let’s find out.
When I told you in the essay about COURAGE how it was a recurring theme in a lot of trans lives, this is part of what I was talking about.
Sometimes the only way to know if things might get better is to risk them possibly getting worse, right? That’s kind of the nature of our existence in a lot of ways, I suppose. For all of us, regardless of if you’re trans or cis.
Every new relationship forms because we open ourselves up to the possibility of it going horribly wrong, because we dare for the potential of it going right and the wonders that lay on the other side of that.
So I went to the appointment. The stylist was lovely and amazing and thought I could, indeed, do bangs. She thought they’d work, and could help reshape my face a bit (which I mentioned I wanted, she didn’t just offer that unbidden, that’d be weird).
We talked over some options, she showed me possibilities, asked tons of questions. She trimmed about three inches off the length, enough to get rid of the dead ends but keep it long enough that it still made me happy.
And I sat there feeling like I was at the top of a mile high drop on a roller coaster as I watched the scissors cut a TON of hair off, right in front of my eyes, to form bangs. I was so scared and probably failed to hide it.
And here we are. I have bangs… and they curl. A lot. Sometimes in weird ways and I have to fight with them to make them look intentional and not like I live in a wind tunnel, and I don’t care. I love them. I can SEE them with my eyes, boinging around up here.
When you spent 90% of your life with a 1/8“ buzz cut, you never see your own hair. But now I ALWAYS see it, and it’s a constant reminder. I’m seeing ME. The real me. She’s here now, and she’s not going anywhere.
Open yourself up to those possibilities, they may just go right. This one did, and it made the lady in the mirror so much closer to the real me I’ve longed to see.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com