04 February 2010

self

I got my hair cut today, where I always do, where the students cut my hair and it only costs $12. I am not extremely picky about my haircut, so the students are perfect for me. I don't even request a senior unless I am getting my hair colored. The only thing about which I am picky is that the lengths line up in front. My hair has a tendency to be slightly longer on the right side than the left, no matter how precisely they cut it.

I have never liked the way I look in mirrors when I am getting my hair cut. It is something about the wet hair drowned rat look and the harsh fluorescent lights. I'm pretty much over it, though, because I have learned through long experience that once my hair is back down and trimmed, I will be delighted. The drowned rat look is just something one has to go through to get to the nice haircut, I suppose.

Two chairs down from me, a girl came in with her mom. The girl was an early teenager. She was not the confident, popular kind of early teenager depicted on television. She was the kind of early teenager I remember being: awkward, uncomfortable, miserable. (Sometimes I think that I was miserable for 19 years straight: from 1990 when we left Liberia until 2009 when I found myself suddenly, surprisingly happy in Gone West. Not that I didn't have happy moments, but I think the general arch was misery.)

I remember being this girl, and I saw from the moment she sat down that she would not like her haircut. I saw it in the way she looked at herself in the mirror. I saw it in the way she held her hair out from her head. Halfway through the haircut, watching her face as the stylist feathered short pieces on the back of her head, I knew, too, that the haircut was all wrong for her. Not for her face - it looked darling - but for her moment in life. I could see on her face that she wanted something that turned her into those confident, popular girls. Instead, she got something that required confidence that she did not have.

The instructor finally came over and talked to her about it. "I don't want to do anything that will make you even less happy," she said, and the girl and her mother left. When the stylist came back upstairs, she sat down in the same chair and cried. The instructor told her not to worry about it, that the haircut was perfectly done and she could not have changed anything, and then got called away. A few other stylists and another instructor gathered around her, trying to comfort her. They were still there when the first instructor came back to check my hair.

"I'm sure you saw what happened there," she said.

"Yeah, I did," I told her. "The problem wasn't that she didn't like the haircut. The problem was that she didn't like herself."

"Yes," she said, "that's the nature of being thirteen."

As I left, I saw the instructor go back to the crying stylist and I hear her say, "The problem wasn't that she didn't like the haircut. The problem was that she didn't like herself," and I smiled to myself.

It's true. I remember that feeling, the desperate hope that this time, this haircut, this outfit would make me beautiful, popular, confident. I remember the disappointment when I was still myself and no one noticed my new outfit but my few closest friends. I hadn't changed at all.

I am so incredibly thankful to be 30 instead of 13. It's so lovely to like yourself.

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