Life Is Too Short For Hair You Hate

I just spent four years growing my hair out from a buzzed off fade faux hawk. It’s mermaid wavy without even trying. My hair is finally long enough to put up on a bun on the top of my head using an XL satin scrunchie I got from Ivory and Brass Studios, and I want it all gone.

Why?

Practical Reasons I'm Cutting It All Off 

For example, I am autistic and the sensory experience of having long hair touching my neck or face causes me to live with my shoulders up in my ears most of the time. It’s like walking into a spider web all day long except you can’t get away from it because it’s literally attached to you. 

I am avoiding hygiene related tasks because of how long it takes to wash, dry, condition, and style my hair. As an autistic person with other unseen disabilities, I have a fluctuating capacity. That means that some days I feel like anything is possible. I can clean the whole house, meal prep for two adults with dietary specifics, create content across all five accounts I manage, run a business, garden, make herbal medicines, and still have time to play video games, have amazing skin, and make connections with those I care about. 

On the other days, sometimes I can’t even get out of bed. The weight of trauma, disability executive dysfunction, THE WORLD EVENTS, and sensory processing is too much. This hair cut is so those days are easier. Because when you’re a permanently disabled person, you have to plan whenever possible for the worst days. Not because you’re living in a low vibe and manifesting struggle (hello abelism and victim blaming favourite tools of the colonial patriarchy), instead it’s because you’ve got a solid grasp on the reality of living with a disability and deserve to put your best effort and energy where it matters the most: on you.

The main reason I’m offing my waves

I don’t feel like I look like myself anymore. Every single time I see a video or a picture of myself my outward appearance fails to reflect how I feel on the inside. I’ve been resisting cutting my hair because having it long with a name like Cheryl helps me to fly under the radar in spaces that are less safe for non-binary people and trans people. And that’s part of the problem. I am queer. I am a nonbinary gender nonconforming person who spent the last five years in a very cisgender alpha femme boss babe social circle and it wore on me.

Every single time I was misgendered even though I introduced myself with my pronouns over and over, even though they were in my zoom handle and IG bio, even though I repeatedly corrected people—every single time it happened I felt less safe to be the real authentic version of me. Every hate comment on the internet, I would change a little more. Every fake review my business got. Every time someone said something about “all that gender stuff” in a group space I was in and the leaders of those spaces said and did nothing. All of that told me that the ME I really was wasn’t safe.

And honestly, fuck that. I make me safe. I am my own safety. I am my own self and I refuse to continue the pattern of chameleoning to keep the peace and prevent harm in a world where political powers publicly and without an inch of compassion or dignity fight to wipe people like me out of existence. 

I felt the most like myself when my wife Liv and I got married. It was in 2021 during the tail end of the Covid 19 restrictions in Canada, and we had a 9 person back yard wedding ceremony. I was the fittest I had ever been. I wore sneakers with rainbow laces. I had the train removed from a very simple dress. I even got the seamstress from the bridal shop to hem the skirt to sit just above my shoes so I could dance without having to hold the skirt or worry about tripping. 

My hair was short, buzzed up the sides, and braided with sea glass hair pins. My make up was barely make up in the wedding sense of the term. Liv and I had a makeup artist airbrush our faces to look like ourselves. We got married in a heat dome in July and I am WHITE as snow, which means I turn RED quickly when the temperature rises over 22C. I wanted to look like me, the real honest me, in all of our wedding photos years down the road. I’m doing this to honour that person.

I’ve been using the same images in all of my social media marketing for two years because I don’t like how I look right now. Not because of my size or my body. But because I don’t look on the outside who I know myself to be on the inside. I’ve been pretending to want to be someone I’m not just in case the world continues its path of eradicating transness and autistic experiences from the public eye, or worse. And I’m done.

This is my line in the sand. What’s yours?