CLINGING TO DEAD ENDS
Or
HAIR AS METAPHOR

Many years ago when I was in boarding school, someone
pointed out to me that when I referred to my hair, I used
the pronoun "them," as in "they just won’t stay in this rubber band." Other people, so I was told, use the pronoun "it" when referring to their hair.

Hmm…

Over the years I have noticed that some people use one pronoun for their hair while other people use the other. Since I am curious about linguistic usage and why we choose the words we choose, I find this interesting. When I talk to people I notice their word choices nearly as much as I notice the content of what they're saying – it’s just the way I listen.

There is definitely a difference between those who use "them" and those who use "it," though I would be hard pressed to tell you what that difference is. I have no particular proven personality theory for this difference, but it was once suggested to me in conversation that perhaps those who use the word "them" have a more personal relationship with their hair, as though it was a separate entity (or more correctly, entities) with a sort of anthropomorphisized personhood, connected to but somehow independent from the identity of the person whose hair they were.

Hmm… could be.

Who is my hair? What are they trying to tell me? What unconscious traits and desires are expressed by them? When they talk, what do they say? And does anybody listen? Would they cease to exist if I decided that they were an it? Or is this just another case of poor pronoun choices in the English language? Or perhaps a perceptual difference of viewing one’s hair as all one thing (it) as opposed to millions of individual things (them)?

The world may never know, though I am inclined to believe the latter explanation, i.e. that it is a perceptual difference between seeing something as singular or plural.

(Another instance of this that I can call to mind is that a friend of mine from Israel refers to spinach in the plural form. She views spinach as a big bunch of individual things as opposed to one thing of spinach. I don’t know if this effects this perception or not, but it is interesting to note that English is the eighth language in which she is fluent.)

At any rate, philosophical debates not withstanding, the other day I had them cut.

This would not be a big deal in the lives of most people, but for me it is always a very unusual event. I have "thing" about getting my hair cut…

For the most part, I just have plain old long hair, nothing fancy, so there is no need to trim it in order to keep some kind of style. There is no style, really – it just sort of hangs back there where I can’t see it and therefore I almost completely forget about it.

And then there was the Bad Hair Cutting Experience I had about seventeen years ago. (Can you tell it scarred me for life?) I went in asking for a trim – a very mild one – and suddenly before I knew it about nine inches of my hair was lying on the ground.

I was very displeased and I let that be known. I have no idea what the beautician was smoking that day because what she gave me is NOT what I requested.

Of course, I didn’t pay for the cut… at least not monetarily. But, I paid for it in other ways by having to wear it around on top of my head twenty-four hours a day, so I think it was more than even. I looked like the Little Dutch Boy for the next several months and there was little I could do about it.

To make matters worse, the cut came in the fall at the end of summer during a time in my life where I spent the vast majority of that season outdoors in the sun. After a few months of this, the top layer of my hair was always bleached out from exposure. This hideous cut took off the entire top layer, expect for an inch near my scalp, leaving me with two-toned hair for the next several months.

It truly was a hideous cut, no lie.

And did I mention that my hair grows very, very slowly? In the back, anyway, which is where the worst part of this cut was. For some reason, the front grows VERY quickly, which I think is odd. Just a few years ago I decided to let my bangs grow out, mostly out of boredom since there really aren’t all that many choices to be made with long hair. In just a year or so, it was impossible to tell that bangs had ever been there.

But the back, well, that is another story.

After my crappy hair cut, I just let it grow. It was a few years before my hair saw another scissors, and then it was my hand holding it. I eventually got over the brunt of my bad hair trauma and had a few hair "styles" while it was in the growing out stage, but once it disappeared past my shoulders where I couldn’t really see it, I just sort of forgot about it.

I had decided many years ago that I was going to have long hair for the rest of my life. For some reason, people seem to get to a certain age where they just feel that having long hair is too "young" for them, and I totally don’t get this. I’ve heard women say this – no kidding.

Looking into it a bit, I think that this "short hair is appropriate for women past a certain age" is the modern day equivalent of the old custom of unmarried women wearing their hair down and married women keeping their hair up. Some say that this is because long, flowing hair is a sign of sexual desirability (just ask Milton), but I think that it is probably because long hair and babies just do not mix.

Most women these days (according to my beautician) cut their hair shortly after having their first child. She was actually shocked to find that I already had one and was still opting to keep all of my locks anyway. Though it is true that I very rarely wear my hair down anymore. For the most part, it is piled up on top of my head away from the curious tearing hands of my always exploring daughter.

But the idea of being "too old" for long hair is beyond me. What inspired me to a life-long commitment to long hair was seeing a woman who used to walk her dogs past my house when I lived on the other side of town. She looked to be in her sixties or so and she had snow white hair down to her waist. Sometimes she would wear it in two braids, but it was always there, hanging down her back as she walked along with her dogs.

I thought that it was the neatest looking thing, and in this day and age, it was rare to see. So, since my hair grows so slow, if I want hair that long when I’m sixty, I have to start preparing now.

It is true, though, that sometimes the ends just need to come off. Very occasionally when my hair was in pig-tail braids, I would cut off the ends of them and call it a day.

The last time I had a couple of inches trimmed was about a year and a half ago, so to have another cut so soon was rather unique.

But, it needed to be done.

It was getting to the point where brushing my hair was an act of futility. Seconds after I had finally wrangled the brush through them, I would have a tangled mess on my hands. Patiently dragging the brush through again and again, by the time I would wind them up to stick them on the top of my head, they would be all tangled again.

It was hopeless. It was getting so that I dreaded washing my hair because I knew that I would have to brush them afterward. It was getting annoying and very time consuming – something had to be done.

The problem was that the ends were totally dead and would get tangled if you looked at them funny or even showed them a barrette. Then I noticed something strange while looking at my hair…

It was as if the hair itself were like the rings within a tree, marking the passage of time with its (their?) growth. My hair had changed over time, as had I.

When I was little, I had naturally wavy hair. At some point coinciding with when life started to suck, my hair suddenly became straight. (Stress causing nutrients to be used differently? Vitamin B perhaps? Who knows…)

For years it seemed "not right" to me on some level that my hair was straight – that just isn’t the way it was meant to be. To compensate for this, I used to perm my hair which at least made me look the way I always thought I "should" look.

Eventually, I got bored with perms – it was just too much work.

Then, strangely enough, when my partner and I got together, suddenly my hair went curly again. No kidding. For a while I told myself that it was, somehow, the remnants of my last perm being magically revived, but after years of telling myself this story I had to admit that it probably wasn’t true.

He curled my hair. I don’t know how he did it, but there it is. And, I’m much happier than I’ve ever been in my life… at least since I was very, very young. Coincidence?

Now, however, I was looking at the tips of my hair, at the oldest growth which marked a time from my past. The ends which were causing so much trouble were ragged out because they were the only part of my hair which still held any traces of chemical processing.

How long ago was my last perm? Almost ten years?

And yet the mark of that remained, tangling in my brush making it impossible to even run my fingers through it unimpeded. It was old, it was damaged and it had to come off. Even the healthy growth was being effected by this remnant from my past -- the strands pulled and broke as I struggled to drag a brush through the damaged bits still clinging to the ends.

So, I had them cut off.

It was a little difficult, I admit. When I told the beautician to trim the dead ends, she specifically asked me what that meant to me. (Which I appreciated.) I told her that I didn’t care how much had to go – I wanted the damaged stuff gone.

I did balk a little when she held up the ends and proclaimed that about six inches would need to go.

Six inches? Jeez… how long will that take to grow back? But I was strong and off it came.

I watched it accumulate in hairy puddles on the floor almost as if watching the last bits of that part of my life falling away from me – dead, unhealthy and no longer of use. Finally unattached, it was swept away and disappeared forever.

It is SO much easier to brush my hair now – I can even run my fingers through it pretty much any time I want. It does feel weird, though, not to have to pull them out of the waistband of my pants or extract them out from under my pillow before I roll over.

But really, that is just one more way that I feel more comfortable. To me, it looks very much shorter than before, though no one else has even noticed unless I point it out to them. Partially this is because six inches doesn’t really make that much of a difference and partially because I usually wear my hair up anyway and most people have no idea how much hair is hiding in that bun.

It would be nice if all dead and useless things could be snipped off and discarded so easily…

I would like to find a pair of meta-physical shears to trim off the old, damaged parts of my life which somehow still cling onto the ends of the healthy growth, sweep them away and be done with it. The parts which tangle up and tug, which snag painfully even though the damage occurred long ago, the things which lead nowhere -- the proverbial dead ends.

In a way, all ritual is metaphor, all ceremony a representation of a transformation in reality. I thought about that while I watched my hair disappear on the eve of a new year and decided that there were things which didn’t need to cling to the ends of my life any longer -- there is no reason to walk roads which only lead to dead ends. I can just leave things where they are, in the past, and walk forward into the future without them, cutting them off above the damaged bits leaving the healthy growth in much better shape, though shorter, than before.

And as the beautician pointed out to me, hair grows faster that way. As soon as the ends split, they start to damage the healthy hair above them, tearing away at something which was once whole. So why not get a trim now and again? Maybe not every six weeks, but perhaps seasonally.

Healthy growth – always something I’ve been fond of. It just took me a while to realize that part of that means that sometimes the dead parts need to be trimmed away – keeping all of it really isn’t viable. Eventually, it gets heavy, causes headaches and gets caught in your butt crack when you take a shower.

No, sometimes there are things that are better to let go of, cut off and sweep away. It makes room for more growth, and in the end, I’m not missing anything but a few tangles.

I’m sure when I’m sixty, I’ll thank myself for it.