We’re coming up on the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and November holds the potential for something much scarier than this horrid disease. But October also marks the two year anniversary of the end of chemotherapy for me, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how my sense of self, and my presentation of self, has changed since then. Thus: an essay about hair. This past month I’ve also been sharing on Notes some of the interviews I’ve done over the past two years with others who’ve gone through treatment themselves, and as I slowly overhaul the interface of this newsletter, I’ve collected them all here. I learned a lot from talking to all four of these women, and hearing their stories helped me better understand my own. Perhaps they’ll do the same for you.
At three inches today, my hair is too long. It lies flat against my scalp where it once ruffled like a brush, bangs plastered to my forehead in an overgrown Caesar. With sideburns winging out over the arms of my glasses and tendrils curling out from the base of my neck, I can barely stand to look in the mirror. I’m getting it cut this afternoon and I am impatient for the return to my baseline one and a half inches, neck shorn, cowlick bristling. Then, I trust, I’ll feel like myself again.
I’ve had very short hair before. In high school, in an Edie Sedgwick phase, I paired black tights and big earrings with a bleached-blonde pixie gone silver thanks to a bottle of Nice’n Easy toner. In my 20s, in a fit of frustration with my hair and my life, I asked a New York City barber to give me a crew cut, which my boyfriend at the time hated — fearful, perhaps, that it was one more signal I was pulling away. He was right on both counts: I was withdrawing, and the crew cut did look bad. Since then I’ve kept it long, to greater or lesser degree. It’s been brown, black, and Manic Panic maroon; it’s been highlighted and lowlighted and ombréd. In 2020, in a fit of pandemic boredom, I went back to being a blonde, and it stayed that way for two years until, of course, it all started to fall out, right on schedule.
When women are diagnosed with cancer, one of the first questions is often about hair. What will happen to it, will it come back, how long will it take, is there anything I can do to save it? I’ve wondered at times if this is because hair loss, the clear visual marker of chemotherapy, is so easily comprehensible. We, otherwise healthy women, understand how to control our appearance, what it takes to feel good by looking good. Before cancer we have no frame of reference for what is meant by “nausea,” “fatigue,” or “gastrointestinal distress.” We can’t comprehend being too weak to climb the stairs, but we do know what we look like with hair, and can begin to visualize ourselves without it.
When I ran my hand through my hair and was left holding a long, blonde fistful, I wasn’t terribly upset. At that point, I’d already been through one cycle of chemo and had come down with covid to boot, a recipe for one of the most wretched weeks of my life. But when Paul flipped on the clippers and started moving toward my head, I did quail. Going bald meant walking through one more door in the mysterious passage that had opened with the first palpable lump. What else might lie on the other side? But I looked up, and nodded, and he touched the machine to my scalp, and as I passed through the door the weight of expectation fell away with each pass of the blade.
That was two years ago, and though I’ve since returned to a professional, I haven’t grown it back. I like it like this. I like the way it looks and, more to the point, I like the way it feels. I feel stripped to my essential self, with nowhere to hide. It is both vulnerable and freeing, a state that is conducive to creativity and to power. I can’t believe it is no coincidence that in this state I have done so much work of which I’m proud; that I feel unblocked after many dead end years.
Sinéad O’Connor, muse for some of this work, famously shaved her head at 20, refusing to kowtow to the record execs who tried to put her in miniskirts, to exploit and better profit from her youth and beauty. For women, buzzcuts and baldness are a protest against patriarchy, against oppression, against commodification. Shaved heads can be an act of solidarity, as when young Iranian women cut their hair in protest of the death of Mahsa Ahmini at the hands of Iran’s “morality police,” and they can be a statement of independence in a culture that prizes long hair as a symbol of femininity and fertility. Short hair can also be a symbol of devotion to some higher power — as when nuns crop their hair and don their wimples, turning away from secular values. Even the wash-and-wear “mom cut” says to the world, “I’ve got other things to worry about, thanks.”
When Elizabeth Gilbert shaved her head last year, she wrote, at Oldster, “I think I look gorgeous. I think I look more like myself than I have ever looked in my life. Because when I look in the mirror, I see a woman who looks FREE.” And while I can’t say that I enjoy the same degree of freedom as a famously globetrotting writer, I do feel … light.
A few months after I started chemo I was interviewed by Ariel Gore for the book project that would become Rehearsals for Dying, her furious, hilarious, heartbreaking memoir of the illness and death of her wife, Deena Chafetz, from metastatic breast cancer in 2023. It’s coming out next year, but I was lucky enough to snag an advance review copy earlier this month, and I sat on my porch turning the pages in the golden autumn sun, heart in my throat, unable to look away.
Only a few of my quotes made it into the book, one about the hell of tamoxifen and the other about my hair. It concludes: “It’s growing back now. It’s about a half-inch long and it looks so cute! It makes me want to go get a skateboard and lean into my inner riot grrrl.”
And that’s the trick: At menopause and midlife, many women remark on how revelatory it is to be, at last, free from the hormonal tides that drove them into relationships, parenthood, and, at times, despair. I have shared this epiphany. I also share their anger at the cultural conditioning that in recent years rings louder than ever: stay pretty, stay young, stay decorative, helpful, and small. Wear ruffles and peasant dresses; buy serums and scrubs and masks. Let them boss you around, grab you by the pussy.
I can’t take it any more. I haven’t been able to take it for a while. One of my close friends hasn’t worn a dress or a skirt since the 2016 election. Something snapped, she said. She just couldn’t any more, and while my own fashion choices have never skewed terribly femme, my cropped head feels of a piece. It is no sacrifice. It feels like no choice at all. I haven’t started skating, but with short hair I feel ready to run, and to fight and to yell.
There are a lot of opinions out there on how to be sick. Look too ill, and you’re alarming — a messenger from the kingdom of death, an unpleasant reminder of our fundamental shared frailty. Look too well and you’re suspect — not sick enough, malingering, possibly faking. It’s a shitty needle we’re handed and every cancer patient who loses their hair threads it differently. For some, passing in the straight world is important, either professionally or personally or both. I would never deny them their pain, or the wigs and scarves deployed to that end. Beauty is a balm, especially when you are otherwise feeling low. But I found I had no self-consciousness or shame about my baldness, and I felt, at times, an activist on the stage of awareness, reminding the world that this? This is what cancer looks like.
At times it was not chic, as when my brows and lashes fell out, and the fuzz on my head grew sick and patchy. But learning to walk through the world unafraid of judgement has been a startling gift. My hair makes visible my own transition through the land of the sick and out the other side, and, like the tattoo on my ring finger and the scars on my chest, flags me as other. Some days, I feel truly genderless, and I’ve never felt so alive.
Range of Motion loudly endorses Kamala Harris for president of the United States. For all that is precious and decent, please get out and vote. Vote for women, vote for immigrants, vote for trans kids and sick kids and all kids who deserve safety and care. Vote for democracy, vote for reality. Vote for the promise of our shared future. We need each other now more than ever.
Loved this so much 🖤
Love this. I just cut my hair last week, I love it when I finally stop living the lie that I understand what to do with longer hair. Thank you for writing a much better essay than I would about it.