Bad Haircuts & Self-Expression

     Hello!! While I have more interesting projects cooking in the background, I wanted to quickly make a post about something that happened yesterday. Even though it sounds pretty silly, it ended up having a somewhat profound impact on me and got me thinking about some deeper stuff, so I wanted to share my thoughts on it.

    Yesterday I got a bad haircut. It happens to everyone, it's not the first nor the last time it'll happen to me, and overall, I know it'll only last a few weeks at most, since my hair grows really quickly. But besides being a blight on my head, I remember feeling a profound dread when thinking about the haircut, even before I saw how it'd turn out. And that's because this whole haircut business had me thinking about identity and self-expression.

    I didn't really want a haircut. And I'll be the first one to admit, my hair was already pretty shaggy and messy, so I understood why my parents were nagging me to get it cut. After all, in just over a month, we'd be visiting my grandma for her 90th birthday, and they want me to look presentable and clean in the probable billions of family photos we will end up taking. So I conceded and scheduled a haircut, even though I really didn't want to. 

    The real issue started right after the haircut was finished. I had asked for a shorter cut around the back and the sides, since they were the densest and messiest parts of my hair, but to only trim the front a little bit, since I preferred it longer up front and it had gotten slightly too long. However, the barber essentially ignored me completely and cut the front and top very short, and left most of the back hair long, giving me the almost exact opposite of what I asked for. I swallowed my pride and left the salon, feeling pretty upset by it.

    My parents reacted pretty positively to the short cut, since it was a lot "cleaner" than what I had before. They made it no secret that they don't like my longer hair, and so this ended up pretty nicely for them. But when I expressed my discontent with the haircut, they reacted pretty negatively and annoyed at me, not understanding the extent by which I was bothered by this haircut.

    To be fair, I didn't fully understand why I was so bothered by it either. I knew that I felt bad about it and hated how it looked, but I've looked worse before, and I never had such a negative reaction to bad haircuts before. The answer came to me much later in the night, as I laid in bed trying to sleep, talking with my friend Isa. 

    Ever since moving out I've realized how little I've developed my sense of identity or self-expression over the years. For the first time, I had essentially complete independence from my parents, and I dressed how I pleased, decorated a tiny dorm room to my liking, and essentially lived how I felt like for just under a year. And it felt great! I had so much space to develop how I felt about things and what I liked that I completely forgot what it was like to be back home. But eventually, summer came around and I was back home.

    I want to absolutely clarify that my parents are great people and I hold no malice or frustration with them or the way they raised me. They're great people that don't have a malicious bone in their body. But sometimes, even well-meaning people can be a bit... much.

    After a few nights back in my bedroom at home, I felt a weird feeling of frustration with it. It didn't feel like home. I found myself yearning for my dorm back in Tallahassee, or for my future apartment that I haven't even stepped foot in yet. And last night, I realized that it wasn't an issue of feeling at home or not, at least, not directly. It was more about realizing how little I expressed myself when I lived back home.

    For the vast majority of my life, I didn't make most decisions for myself. Not in an abusive or repressive way, obviously, but my parents just made most of my decisions for me. I seldom bought new clothes, I didn't really decorate my own room, my parents did all of that for me because they wanted the best for me, and did everything with pure intentions. But that also meant that I never really developed a strong sense of personal style or aesthetic- I just went along with whatever was given to me because it was easy and I wasn't opposed to anything.

    My bedroom at home is very nice, by anyone's standards. I have repainted walls, a nice big bed, and enough space to do whatever I want with it and plenty of wall space to hang up whatever poster or picture I wanted. But I didn't. The only things on my walls are a few Stranger Things posters from six or seven years ago that my parents got me when the show was coming out. The walls were painted shades of blue, even though I never asked for it, or even like the color blue. These sorts of decisions were made by loving parents who were simply trying to do whatever they thought I liked, which is such a nice, rare thing to have. This isn't inherently an issue. Its just that, by having so many things done for me, I never developed a sense of doing things myself, or making my own creative decisions.

    Now, coming back from college, where I had learned to make all of these decisions and choices for myself, I feel awkward and out of place in my bedroom. This doesn't feel like my room, it feels like my parents' idea of my room, which I'm not sure is a clear way of saying it, but it's the best way I could describe my feelings about it. And its an odd position to be in, because the obvious solution that you're probably thinking of is just redecorate the room, moron! But I don't think its the proper solution, since we don't really have the money to spend on redoing an entire room right now, and even if we did, I'd much rather save my time, effort, and money on decorating my college apartment, which is where I'll be spending the next few years in.

    So yeah, a bad haircut really had me thinking about my identity and self-expression over the years, and how much more I've developed in under a year at college than I had for over a decade at home. Hopefully over time I can start changing aspects of my life at home to better reflect the person I feel I am, and just like my hair, it can grow into something I'm more comfortable with in the future.