Is Hair Everything?

by bela davidson

Hair is everything. Don’t shoot the messenger.

I have been bald before, against my will. After I was done being bald

against my will, I started the process of growing my hair back from

scratch, from beneath the scalp, or as I came to think of it, from

beyond the grave. My beyond-the-grave hair grew in soft and fine

like a baby’s. This hair was 0 years old and was completely different

from the hair I was familiar with, which was already 15 years old by

the time it up and left me. My 0 year old hair did not cooperate with

me. It sprung up from the scalp and into the world, and then

flattened out in a tantrum, heavy and fearful, in stubborn response

to the indelicate chemical touch of my shampoo, or conditioner, or,

god forbid, my curl-keeping cream. It was infuriatingly unresilient

and sensitive to the elements and no matter what I tried, it always

looked bad. I always looked bad. For two years. Because it took

around two years for me to slowly grow out the beyond-the-grave

hair and in its place sprout stronger, thicker, better hair. Two years of

bad hair, which compounded on the year I served in Bald Jail. And

Bald Jail (being bald against my will) was an exceptionally pervasive

form of self-image torture. If hair wasn’t everything, this might have

all been fine, but it wasn’t, so I became distraught about it.

Even though I became distraught about it, I am not raging against

the Hair Machine. If I wanted to dethrone Hair from its ruling

position over my social, cultural and personal identities, I would have

to admit myself back into Bald Jail, but this time, proudly. However,

to become Bald again (Bald, capital B) would require so much effort

it might actually undermine the anti-beauty-standard message of the

campaign. A buzz cut is not Bald. That is still hair. Bald capital B

means uprooting hairs from follicles, and this also includes eyebrows

and eyelashes, which I swear no one considers when they think about

baldness. That all-encompassing baldness is the kind of Bald I was.

Now that I have eyebrows, I feel super un-Bald and I marvel at them

every morning in the mirror. I watch young women on Tiktok use a

filter to scrub their foreheads blank and ogle at how freaky they look

without eyebrows. I get it. I felt the same way when my eyebrows of

15 years up and left me. So, I am not anti-hair. But I do feel

strangely arrested in the orbit of Planet Hair. I think we all feel it,

even just dormantly. You only realize the sheer and inexplicable

power of your hair once it is gone.

I pulled a muscle in my foot a few weeks ago. I was limping across

Kings Cross and becoming stressed. I got home and googled my

symptoms. It only took a couple of days of marinating for me to

start mourning my hair. Again. Because I am constantly

preemptively mourning my hair. There is this volatile train-of-

thought that carries an anxious or preoccupied person (me) to

extreme or irrational conclusions (bald). The issue of the sore foot

was mostly arbitrary, but it was a ticket onto the health anxiety

vehicle. In which I travelled and docked at Bald station, once again.

The way I’m speaking about the train falsely takes the onus off of

the self, as if I am just a victim of the vehicle, but in reality, I am

pretty active in perpetuating my own neuronal pitfall. The neuronal

pitfall I’m referring to is conclusion-lead-research. Like that game

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where you make the shortest chain of

celebrity connections to get to Kevin Bacon, starting from some

arbitrary famous person. Like Liza Minelli to Kevin Bacon, or Elon

Musk to Kevin Bacon. People form connections. People play

connection games. I can’t help but play Six Degrees of Bald every

single time I have a sore foot, or anything akin to a sore foot.

There’s a poem that plays the connection game really masterfully,

McDonalds is Impossible by Chelsea Martin. The poem tumbles

through a series of constrained conditions, ‘if ’ this thing happens,

‘then’ this other thing must certainly happen. When I was in high

school I took some computer science classes, and I’m not going to

attempt to convince you that I know anything about computer

science, but thinking about action and consequence within the

programming if/then conditional framework is helpful, because you

are forced to design the flow of logic from scratch. If you press

‘space’, then the game will start. If you press ‘X’, then the game will

end. Importantly, there is also an ‘else’ condition in this structure,

which is supposed to account for all other possibilities that you didn’t

otherwise specify: Else you press ‘A’ or ’S’ or ‘D’ or ‘F’ or any other

key on the keyboard, instead of ‘X’ or ‘space’, an error message pops

up, or some other thing happens. Omitting the ‘else’ condition is bad

practice because you can’t anticipate your human user, who has free

will, to behave predictably. You prepare for all possibilities.

Otherwise, your program crash lands. In McDonalds is Impossible,

Martin omits the ‘else’ condition, but this is fine because the user

(the reader) is guided by hand through the flow of the poem. It is a

journey with a singular, gravitational destination, all the way down

the spinning vortex. In my poem Foot-to-Bald Connection, I did

want to give the reader some choice, which will change how the

poem is read from person to person, but I still omit the ‘else’. This

was my attempt at a choose-your-own-adventure style poem, but

with a single funnelling ending: the only conclusion is that hair is

everything and you should start mourning now.

So now I’ll speak more about that single funneling ending, about

why I think Hair is Everything. For most of my life, my hair was the

most noticeable physical trait about me, so it became one of my sole

identifiers. It was big and took up space and impossible to ignore.

My hair was so much of an identifying trait that when it was

completely wet (darkened and flattened), I was told I looked

unrecognizable. So, my hair was very personal. Alice Walker wrote a

piece called Oppressed Hair, which speaks a bit about hair’s cultural

and personal powers. Walker speaks about the healing act of

embracing her hair and allowing it to grow freely and uninhibited

with her person, even humanizing her love for it: “I found it to be

springy, soft, almost sensually responsive to moisture. As the little

braids spun off in all directions but the ones I tried to encourage

them to go, I discovered my hair's willfulness, so like my own! I saw

that my friend hair, given its own life, had a sense of humor.” So hair

is a friend, but it is also something more precious. How many

religious and spiritual practices acknowledge the sacredness and

power of a woman’s hair? I’m thinking of head coverings, hijabs for

Muslim women and sheitels for orthodox Jewish women. Hair is

under sacred protection, or at least there is some highly spiritual tie

between hair and gender, personhood and social positioning. What is

most interesting to me, though, is that despite all of this, hair is a

separate thing from the self. There is no blood coursing through it’s

strands. It is not a limb. Hair is somehow separate from the self and

it is the self. Hair is like a friend and hair is like your baby and hair is

you you you, everything.

There is no graceful way for me to fully resolve the theme of health

anxiety, because it is something impossible to predict or contain. The

same way that hair is steeped in all of these potent cultural and

personal significances, for me, hair is a heady representation of

health and freedom. Hair is Everything means Health is Everything,

and Freedom is Everything. Sickness is Not Everything, and Being

stripped of Choice is Not Everything, I just cannot live that way, so

as long as the reverse is true, that train will soar forwards and

forwards and upwards and fearlessly over these tricky, tempting

sinkhole stations. I’ll leave you with this Alice Walker quote about

hair and freedom and joy: “Again I stood in front of the mirror and

looked at myself and laughed. My hair was one of those odd,

amazing, unbelievable, stop-you-in-your-tracks creations--not unlike

a zebra's stripes, an armadillo's ears, or the feet of the electric-blue-

footed boobie--that the Universe makes for no reason other than to

express its own limitless imagination. I realized I had never been

given the opportunity to appreciate hair for its true self. That it did,

in fact, have one.”