Hair Hair

Hair length does not have gender, but growing up I was not allowed to have my hair long because that’s not what “boys” do, or maybe it was financially cheaper to have a buzz cut. (It was pretty tight financially for my parents). I’m not sure anymore. It’s been over 3 decades since I imagined myself having long luxurious hair just like the lady in a shampoo commercial. 

My dream came true when I went to a salon to get my weaves with my girlfriend. Chatting. Laughing. Nervous. My dream came true: going to a hair salon with my girl! When my hair was done, I felt something that was familiar. My friend took me for a walk outside. It felt like when I wanted to kill myself. Narrow, oppressive, closed, heavy, shaky…self-hatred to put it in a simpler term. But now, It wasn’t the past when I didn’t have supportive adults anymore. I had a friend beside me comforting my traumatic response to having long hair, just sobbing on the street. She just held my hand and told me that she was proud of me. I’m forever grateful. 

I’ve finally got my hair, but I kept seeing myself through internalized transphobic lenses. I felt ugly. I projected that people around me would think that too. But then a houseless person asked me…

“Miss, can I have a dollar? Oh sir.”

Werk. The hair works. It’s so binary and stupid, but at the moment I felt good. I wish I had some cash. 

My attention was so close to myself that it felt out of body. I tried to call up on compassion. I don’t know if it came. But I found myself accepting others more on stage. Oh, I ran to my Broadway show after the salon, no time to process because of capitalism that keeps us working. I felt open and did not know which was my emotion and which was a song as I performed on stage. I cried in the shadows and openly throughout the performance. Didn’t Buddha say that the proximate cause for compassion was overwhelm in the face of suffering? Maybe that was that, or just vibration of the base and drum. 

I fear sometimes that someone is gonna come and kill me, if I do something wrong. In my head I was definitely doing something wrong, having long hair, but no one came to kill me. That might actually happen along the way though… unfortunately. Let’s get real. How many trans women gets murdered every year! 

In the end of the day, it was catastrophic and too much for me. My friend took them out. I felt free. Free of the particular trauma. I had long hair and I was safe. I asked my friend to take them out, and now I’m back. Back to my awkward fades, barely ponytail. But different because I chose this. No one told me to. I did. 

I hope you can see that I carried on with cultivating my own worthiness. It is a big part of Vipassana practice that I learned. Worthy of loving, being loved, and claiming my identity. As a person who believed that I was not worthy of even a suicide, I started to doubt that I might kill myself when I actually felt worthy. If it was true that worthlessness saved me, would that be the case? I called Jesse and he said not likely…  I appreciated that. It did stop me to kill myself though the relationship was super unhealthy. Now brahma viharas have become really a necessary practice for survival for me.