fractals_and_fragments

Tomorrow we are cutting off all our hair to raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation, so we thought we’d take a moment to reflect on our hair before it’s all gone.

We’ve had a somewhat complicated relationship with our hair for most of our life. It’s curly. Not super curly, but enough that our parents, one with very straight hair and the other who keeps it very short, had no idea how to care for it. It’s a brown colour and when we were younger was a lighter brown that could look more gold in sunlight. Our brother’s is very similar.
When we were younger haircare pretty much involved our mother attacking our head with a brush. We didn’t like getting our hair brushed as it hurt, and we had to sit still for a long time. During this time we had many a dreadlock cut out of our hair. As we got a bit older our mother started taking our hair care more seriously, which led to our hair having all manner of strange things placed into it. One memorable experience was having avocado, which we hate, placed into it. People around us used to always tell us how cool our hair was and how lucky we were, but at the time we hated how high maintenance it was. We liked to brush it out for events and such, making it really frizzy, like a lions mane.

Finally , we were like 12, she took us to a hairdresser for people with curly hair. It completely changed how we looked after and viewed our hair. They thought me and my mum how to properly care for it, and style it. From then on we had a munch better handle on it, with our mum still helping us a lot with looking after it. We also got a silk pillow case which greatly decreased dreadlocks. Around this time was when we cut it to be a bit shorter. Not much but our parents had always done haircuts for us and we always wanted it long, and had aspirations to grow it all long as we could. We don’t think we had made to connection between hair length and maintenance yet. But we cut it to around shoulder length around the age of 12.
Several things led us to change how we felt about our hair. Ability to properly care for it led to a more positive relationship with it, but as we got older we started discovering gender stuff. It was a fight to for our parents (specifically our mum) let us cut our hair short. We had a series of haircuts, getting shorter and shorter, including one specific bad one when our hair was cut wet and when it dried it looked terrible. We are very cautious about who cuts our hair because so many hair dressers dont know how to cut curly hair. It was also around this time that hair maintenance was handed over completely to us, something we are not equipped properly to do. We can maintain short hair, but as soon as it gets too long, we end up with dreadlocks and it looking bad due to going unwashed for days. This, along with gender expression, motivates us to keep it shortish.

We do like our hair curly hair and we don’t wish we had straight hair. We feel mixed about dying it colours because we like the expression but don’t like that is damages our hair. We’ve done it before but only sections. We’ve wanted to shave our hair for many years now; to see that it’s like. But our parents have always said no and that we have to wait till 18. We’ve only just managed to convince them now, that we can shave it for charity, and they are still upset by it.
We are excited, although it’s strange that it’s happening so soon, when we thought it’d be another year before we could do it. We’ll probably miss it, but also are looking forward to not having to worry about it. Our typical hairstyle involves a very short side and that alone gives us gender euphoria so we are excited to see how we feel about a fully shaved head.

We wanted to add more details, but it’s sort of fallen apart at the end cos we’re tired and sick and wanted to get this done before tomorrow soooo. It was still good to get most of our thoughts about this down.