Hair

Two things inspired this post. One was a conversation with a volunteer recently where she asked me about my hair journey (she has this conversation quite often with different people). The second was this afternoon whilst walking through Thamel (a very touristy area in Kathmandu), a man pointed at me and said “you look like a monk”. I frowned a bit and kept on walking.

So, hair. Interesting isn’t it? I shaved my head quite some time ago because I don’t like hair. When you have long hair you have to wash it, brush it, tie it back, it falls out and covers the sofa and clogs up the shower drain. It’s hard work. Short hair isn’t that much better, you have to keep getting it cut and at some point it is too short to tie back but sufficiently long that it blows in your face. It’s hard work.

Shaving my head works for me. Lots of advantages, I love it.

But hair cuts / styles come with social stories attached, whether we like it or not.

I have been told I look like a monk; asked if I was nun; told to grow my hair because then I will be beautiful; asked if I was sick; asked if I’m a lesbian; asked if I’m non-binary; asked if I was a girl or a boy (by a five year old in a Scottish primary school, he was just asking because he didn’t know). Really folks, it’s just a hair cut!!

And my short hair is definitely not the most revolutionary hair cut around. Some people go for magnificently outrageous colours. Some go for length. Some style it beautifully. Some never have a hair out of place. Some always look like they were just frightened out of bed. A reverse Mohican (where the middle strip is shaved and the sides are left to grow) may seem like a hilarious thing to do as a bet, until one discovers that that is the local punishment for paedophiles. In some cultures widows have their hair shaved in order to ostracise them and make them unattractive. In some cultures a woman’s hair should only be seen by her husband. In some places men have long hair, in other places this is frowned upon.

And then there is facial hair. Men can have moustaches, women cannot. Some moustaches are excellent, others are seen to be terrible for any number of reasons (too bushy, too oiled, too slick, too reminiscent of a famous dictator, etc). Beards are another minefield!

And then there is the charity aspect of it. Sometimes people shave their head or grow their beard or dye their hair etc in order to raise money for charity. We’ve had a few of these here on project. We do auctions periodically where people bid on things and people have offered hair cutting or growing. They often raise quite a bit of money. Some people also grow their hair and then cut it all off and donate it to people who make wigs with human hair (for cancer patients etc).

Hair is a way that we can all be really rather unique (if we want to be) or to be really uniform (if we want to be). It is quite an astounding mechanism for self expression, whether we want it to be or not. I just hope the statement my hair cut makes most of the time is “I just don’t like hair very much”.