Emma Gleason is cutting off her hair — here’s why
My hair, like my anxiety, has been weighing me down.
Things feel out of our control right now. Everything is uncertain and overwhelming — it’s all a lot but also nothing at the same time. We’re in a collective free-fall, untethered, and on any given day I feel like I’m floating, drifting or sinking in the waves of anxiety. Or some days are fine, even good.
In times of chaos, it can be comforting to seek out things we can control. Appearance is a common subject, accessible and malleable, with hair a frequent and famous vehicle for executing control and manifesting power. In Little Women, Jo March wields progressive agency by chopping hers off to help her family, while The Bible’s Samson lost his strength when Delilah cut his hair.
We’re all rather attached to our hair — quite literally — and it’s a medium for presenting and exploring our identity. Ella Yelich-O’Connor recently discussed the subject, positioning hair as a source of power and spirituality, while revealing that she was growing hers out before releasing another record. “Hair takes time to grow,” she wrote. “And I knew I needed time.”
Unlike Lorde, I feel like my hair is sapping my strength. A shallow and privileged complaint, in the scheme of burdens it is minuscule. However, I want it gone, most of it anyway. Clingy yet also unmanageable, it seems to have absorbed all my stress, and manifests this by getting caught on things constantly, tangled and knotted, and it remains damp for hours.
There’s also vanity to it all. I’ve always considered my hair my best feature, and it has earned me many compliments. Calling to mind, again, Louisa May Alcott’s book, I always felt it was my “one beauty”. I hide behind it sometimes, when socially anxious or insecure.
Hair is powerful and political. It has long been tied to youth and vitality, with its loss or changes seen as representative of waning fertility and eroding social capital. No hair journeys are the same, and many are more fraught than others — with hair a particular point of oppression for people who don’t fit into the narrow, racially dictated margins of appearance that society deems acceptable.
In a stroke of luck and genetics, my family enjoys what traditional eurocentric beauty standards consider ‘good hair’. Thick and healthy, everyone has a lot of it, and there is regularly talk about various relatives who retained a full head of dark hair into their seventies and eighties. It has become family mythology of sorts, but the stories are more or less true.
Likewise, my hair has slotted neatly into conventional beauty standards; it’s naturally blonde, thick and mostly straight. I have not had to change it or spend time and money ‘fitting in’ and appeasing the politics of appearance — a privilege that I’m acutely aware of.
In my twenties there were of course brash experiments (platinum blonde and red) but currently it’s my natural hue, streaked from extended periods in the sun, depicting slices of time like the rings of a tree. The newest hair is darker, due to the security of a desk job this past year, and somehow darker still from the recent lockdown.
It reaches my tailbone now, and is saturated with memories acquired during the past five years, since I stopped getting regular cuts. I met the love of my life, quit my job, travelled the world, then landed on my feet back home — all things I’m incredibly fortunate to have experienced. We had roughly planned out the next five years too, and then everything turned upside down when the pandemic and its economic effects spread across the world.
I lost my job. But countless others lost more, or never had it in the first place.
We’re collectively staring down the barrel of a different, harder future. More than anything I feel the need to let go, and so, in a sense, I am — relinquishing my source of vanity and cutting my hair off, momentous to me but insignificant in the scheme of things. Not quite a whim, more a sudden urge that’s festered for a while. I valued my hair for so long, but it's time that value was leveraged in some small way.
I’m cutting it to raise money for Women’s Refuge. Domestic violence is a deep, wide chasm in our community that’s hard to navigate, but they endeavour to do so, providing safety for women and children. Donations are welcome, if you’re in a position to, and the hair itself will be given to Freedom Wigs.
So many people have lost so much, the least I can do is lose some hair.
https://givealittle.co.nz/fundraiser/cutting-my-hair-for-womens-refuge
Words — Emma Gleason
Photography — Ophelia King
