A personal story about body image, beauty standards, and self-reclamation...
I caught up with my Mum for lunch last week and she was admiring my hair, and it got me thinking about my hair adventures. 💁🏼♀️
I recall a time when I was very attached to my hair as an expression of my femininity.
My hair is currently fairly long and completely natural. I’m growing it for my wedding in November.
I’m really enjoying this ‘phase’ of low maintenance, natural locks and just getting a trim every couple of months when it gets too heavy.
I’m tall – people I know ‘online’ are consistently surprised when they meet me in person – I’m 5’10” or 176cm. I’m also a strong / athletic build.
For a long time, I felt like I NEEDED long hair to balance out my ‘big’ frame. I was worried I’d look very masculine with short hair, particularly from the back.
This is something I hear a LOT of women talk about.
In my early 30’s I recognised the need to change how I felt about my body, and separate my love for myself and my body from how it looked.
I’d had a hard relationship in my 20’s that had reinforced pretty negative feelings about my body and size. Then when I retired from professional sport in my late 20’s and stopped exercising like an athlete, I gained weight.
I wasn’t overweight, but compared to the body of a young athlete that I’d lived in for a decade, I was curvier and softer, and it felt terrifying to me…
So I went on a journey to learn to love my body as the vessel I get to do this life inside of, separate to how it looked.
Along the way, I felt inspired to cut my hair short! It felt confronting to me as it felt like ‘letting go’ of this part of me that (in my mind) had protected me from judgement about my body.
Some part of me was sure that if I cut off my hair, people would all of a sudden notice I was this HUGE person. 😢 Pretty sad in retrospect, I feel a lot of compassion for that younger version of me.
BUT, turned out, that I enjoyed my shorter hair – it was really fun. My partner at the time didn’t all of a sudden stop finding me attractive. The world didn’t shift on its axis and I didn’t become a social pariah.
So, I started getting creative with my short locks. Letting my hairdresser dye it increasingly bold colours. I got a shaved patch, which turned into an undercut.
And finally, in the first year of the pandemic, I decided to shave my head.
I raised some money for a friend’s charity, and shaved it on a Facebook live for all to see.
It was super liberating, and felt like a powerful ‘F**k No’ to anything outside of my own inner compass defining my sense of self, sense of beauty, of femininity etc.
I felt HOT with a shaved head! 🔥
It felt like permission for my most sassy, ‘give no f**ks’ aspects to shine.
I got compliments on it everywhere I went. Women telling me they WISHED they had the confidence to do it.
It completely changed how I felt about beauty, femininity and expression.
I realised how impermanent our appearance is.
I was changing how my hair looked every 8 weeks. A different colour, shaving interesting patterns into the side. Shaving it all off again and trying something different.
(Also, when I say ‘I’ here, I absolutely mean my hairdresser! 😅 I was surprised by the number of people during that time who asked me if I did it myself!)
I hung out in ‘short pixie cut’ land for a while before deciding it was time to grow it out. At the same time, I decided to stop dying it and see what colour my natural hair was.
Three years on and I love how healthy my hair feels and I’m enjoying the long hair look.
The unsustainable standards of elite sport level fitness requirements, combined with the relationship I chose in my 20’s AND the culture we live in, left some distortions in my psyche around appearance.
Chopping my hair off and painting it wild colours played such a part in learning that my femininity is something that I EMBODY, and has nothing to do with how I look.
In retrospect it was an important and fun phase of defining myself, exploring different flavours of the feminine and playing with expression and creativity.
So – photos in the title image – the first one in the top left is right after my most recent haircut – basically present day. Then a few shots from my wild hair adventures. 🌈🦄
Curious – have you ever considered shaving your head? Would you like to? Do you feel things like your appearance, or hair length, impacts how you feel about yourself as a woman, or your ability to embody feminine qualities?
