Hairless

Hairless

I never thought of myself as a vain person. That is until recently when my hair fell out. It started a few years ago, shortly after I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. The medication I took caused my hair to become thin and frayed, and in my quest to keep it full and shiny, I colored it and curled it. I fluffed it and I pressed it. First I tried a reddish hue, thinking it would deepen the blue in my eyes. Feeling like a clown, I added a darker brown. Then, with my face looking pale and sort of ghoulish, I thought some nice platinum streaks would brighten my appearance. When my blonde highlights turned gray, and my brown lowlights turned green, I covered my hair with an even, natural golden brown, which would have been fine if I had stopped there. But no, I gave myself a body wave, which would have been fine, too, except I fell asleep and left the permanent solution on my over-processed, thinning and weakened hair for a duration of about three times what was called for on the box. My hair looked like a Geri-curl on acid on a Caucasian. I could no longer push, pull or drag a comb through it. At this time, my ex-boyfriend - my very first boyfriend - pulled into town after not having seen me in 22 years.
"You look exactly the same," he lied, as we met and hugged at the local coffee shop. He did look exactly as I had remembered him, though. He looked seventeen (not forty!) but with longer hair, a thicker waist, and a few crow's feet framing his blue-green eyes. When we touched, it felt like home. When he looked at me, I felt giggly.

I wondered how it was possible to feel like this - to feel as if no time had passed between our last meeting, when I was a freshman in high school, and now. I was awestruck by the way it seemed our bodies remembered one another, called out to one another. I knew the scent of him. I knew the roughness of the palm of his hand. I felt a tug at my heartstrings; I found myself filled briefly with a profound longing.
French philosopher Jacque Lacan said the nature of desire springs from the human need to fill a hole in the self. We seek to fill ourselves with this new job, that new love, a new hairstyle, for example, not realizing that once we attain our heart's desire, we will no longer desire it. Maturity, then, must be becoming aware of this paradox and consequently living for things beyond the self, beyond one's wishes. When a person worries more about things like integrity, honesty and the kindness of strangers than her own desires, she has achieved a certain amount of maturity, Lacan has said.
But the paradox is only the first problem with desire. The second and more important problem is that it is this endless chasing of our wants that leads us to make the biggest mistakes of our lives, or, as I tell my children, the "bad choices."
So, I think I will write about damaging my hair as my Big Mistake, my quest for vanity as my biggest flaw. I envision a support group for people like me. "Hello, My name is Janet," I'll say. "I have chemically dependent hair." I'm impulsive and obsessive. Not a good combination. I think back to a PBS documentary I once saw where these people had similar compulsions, not to change their hair but to remove their body parts. One girl swore she would be better adjusted without an arm; a man wanted surgeons to remove his lower leg. I find myself somehow understanding these peoples' desires and then I realize I am most likely completely insane. But what I really want, I know, is to understand why I can't stop wanting.

The first inkling for change myself, to do something completely for vanity's sake, was to get a tattoo. It's common for rape survivors like myself to want tattoos, but I wasn't aware of this at the time. My therapist informed me later that bodily mutilation and even "self-cutting" is a way for people who have been emotionally harmed to create a visible scar. Some people even take razor blades to their skin and etch scars in elaborate patterns, he said. It's a way of labeling oneself as having been abused - an outward symbol of an inward, invisible hurt. It's a way of marking one's own boundaries or territories or of saying, "It's my body and I'll do with it what I wish."

My first was a small tattoo consisting of two Chinese characters over my left breast in pastel inks. I got it when I turned thirty-two, the same year I finally told my husband that I had been raped six years prior. I remember sliding into that sweaty orange vinyl chair at the tattoo parlor and the apprentice staring hard at me as if he was trying to determine why a 30-something mother would want a tattoo in the first place. He had a goatee and a pierced eyebrow and his ears were all pointy and elf-like. His name was Eddie. He helped me pick out the symbols for "artist" and "writer" and I pointed to my left side because I am left-handed and somehow wanted to denote that. I didn't feel much of anything during that first session. I was aware of a few pinpricks, maybe, and nerve pops and a lot of blood and ink swirling together down my front and into my bra. I remember, too, feeling surprised that it all felt sort of sexual. I felt warm and alluring as this little elf marked me with indelible ink.
When I came home with my second tattoo, my young son cried, "Get that lizard off my momma!" This time I had chosen a "lizard king" a la Jim Morrison. I had just entered graduate school and felt as if I needed to celebrate this new era of my life. "I am the lizard king, I can do anything," I thought. But alas, this tattoo - on my left ankle - hurt. It hurt so badly that the self-described artist yelled at me to keep still about twenty times in as many minutes. He suggested next time I smoke a joint first. When I recalled my therapist saying that "emotional numbing" - or being unable to feel anything physically or emotionally - also was a common characteristic of victims of abuse, I thought: Now that I can feel something, does this mean I am healed emotionally?

I remember, too, that my teen-age boyfriend didn't believe in God. He still doesn't, he says. He also doesn't believe in therapists. "Have you ever noticed that if you break it into two words, it becomes 'the rapist'?" he asks.


Sometime later, I am talking to a girlfriend and tell her that I now sport tattoos. She says, "I'm sorry, did you say tattoos? As in plural?" She deadpans, "When will you be picking out the trailer?"



On my thirty-seventh birthday, I felt the urge to adorn my body with a third tattoo. I am still considering it, and I think I want a phoenix, something to symbolize that I have finally risen from the ashes of my former life, one filled with the pain of living disingenuously. Because I realize the whole "rising from the ashes" thing is so cliché, I think I will put this one on my right side, just because I'm not right-handed. But this is not you, my friends will say. You are not the type of person to get tattoos, to long for lost loves, to change your hair color, they would say.
"I remember the first day of college at Texas A&M," Susan reminds me. "You got off the bus and had on this white linen dress and a matching hair bow. You swore that your parents didn't ever have sex! You were so ... I don't know. Wholesome." When I had an affair early in my marriage, the same friends told me, "Stop that! Go back to being yourself."
But this is me, I thought. This is who I want to be. Let me go.
I figured out a while back that I didn't want to die and have people say, "She was a very nice, normal person." I decided it would be much better for people to know that I felt things passionately, even if it meant that I sometimes made inappropriate choices. Even if it meant that I would make a few of the Big Mistakes along the way.

I heard a woman once say that she had tried so long to keep from being seen as a sex object that now no one saw her at all. I feel that I've tried for so long to keep doing just as everyone expected that I lost myself somewhere along the way. Or maybe I've never known myself. It's not that I've become invisible but that I've yet to become visible. I want to start over and prepare everyone the next time through. I will announce it early so that there will be no confusion over which Janet is the real Janet.
I will have sex at too young an age and I will like it. I will party too much in college and study too little and waste everyone's money and time. I will lose too much weight, and I will gossip and lie and drink dark beer in cavernous biker bars. I will have unsafe sex with strangers. Then I will get really fat. I will find God and lose Him and find him again and again. I will get married and go bankrupt trying to fertilize my barren body. I will have children and then forget them all over town. I will become ill and whiny and I will not throw my tissues in the trash or cover my mouth when I cough. I will double-dip. I will smoke pot and drop acid. I will go skinny-dipping and dance naked after midnight and have an affair with my boss. I will not go to bed on time. I will not be the early bird. I will not eat my veggies. I will not keep the tank full. I will not look on the bright side. I will not say my prayers. I will jog without a bra on! Yes! I will get tattoos. Yes, I will change my God-given hair color five times in a row. And, yes, goddamnit, I will wear all-black and go barefoot despite diabetes and play in the leaves and dance in the rain and cry in the moonlight!

"Do you know me now?" I will ask my friends. I will ask my family, "Do you want to know me now?"

I notice that my ex-boyfriend is still talking to me. He wants to know if I still play the piano. I played for nine years, and he used to come over to my house for no other reason than to hear me play classical music. He would sit there in my family's parlor, he with his long hippie hair and ratty blue jeans, and fold his hands patiently in his lap and listen. For some reason, that piano playing became the one distinguishing characteristic for me-at-that-age. It meant to him that my upbringing was more "highbrow" than his. To him, I will always be that classy piano-playing girl, one of the Hollywood Park girls, one of the "nice" girls.

I tell him I haven't played seriously in years. I tell him that I never really liked playing.


The day is over now and my former love has gone back home to his wife of fifteen years and their three kids. I cry in the car alone once he's gone. I don't even know what I'm crying about. But I do know. I do. I'm crying because this guy, this high school drop-out, this ex-drug addict, this boy-man with whom I grew up, has turned out better than me, I think. He has no apparent conflicted feelings about his wife or about his life. He doesn't long for me or anyone else. He doesn't dream of returning to the past or of being wealthy or famous in the future. His desires are for his family, mostly, and not himself.
Suddenly, I'm riddled with angst. I hate myself for my stupid, lusty thoughts. I hate myself for wanting to be thirteen again and childless and free to live simply for myself. I hate my hideous hair. I hate that I never wore bright colors around him. I hate that I never took risks when I had the chance, when I had the right to be selfish, when I didn't have adult responsibilities. Mostly, I hate that I have grown old without having grown up.

I go to the beauty shop to have my hair "super conditioned" thinking that at least maybe I can stop the breakage, slow the demise of my weakening locks. As I sit back down in the chair and as the towel is removed from my head, I feel too much air on the back of my neck. My head feels spotty and drafty. I open my eyes and watch the hairdresser stare in horror at the towel she has just pulled from my head. She and I look at my hair - a good four inches of it - lying on the inside of the towel.

I go home mostly bald and crying. My family embraces me, and I think they deserve a purple heart for all they've been through. My daughter cries with me; my son says, "You are beautiful, mama, but you smell like a lawnmower." My husband says, "It is only hair." And, "You are more than your hair."
Daily, I stand in the mirror and I practice saying it:
"I am more than my hair."

-30-