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I’m never known what to do with my hair. Mostly, I just leave it be, hoping that by adopting the shaggy mussed up look that was popular when I was a teen, that will count as some kind of style. Style, really is the root of the problem here, in that I don’t have any. I like comfort. I like simple. In many ways my hair is a follicular extension of my standard primary outfit, which is jeans and a t-shirt. I am so opposed to any kind of fashion that I don’t even really wear shirts. Something about buttons bothers me. Give me an outfit that feels like it’s only one step away from pyjamas, then I’m happy.
I think the blame doesn’t entirely lie with me, however. My hair has to cop some of it as well. It is blonde and thin and has a predilection to poke out away from my head at odd angles. I think, like a lot of people, the hair I most admire is that which is an opposite to my own; dark, and thick, and which falls in curls and swirls around the head. Basically, if anyone has the same hair as a cocker spaniel, I can’t help but look at them with admiration and envy.
Saying all that, presently my hair may be the best it’s ever looked. This is thanks to a combination of actually asking the hairdresser to give a little extra love beyond a short back and sides, and occasionally using my hand as a comb to push it to one side so that it feels like its creator had at least some kind of vision in its design rather than just letting it go to seed like a ragged thicket. For reference, here is a self-portrait I took recently in order to supply a headshot to my publisher.
Not bad, right? It’s not hair you immediately need to call your Mum and tell her about, but it’s doing what it can. And, like I said, this is the peak of what this hair has looked like. Along the way there have been many a misfire, many a regrettable choice, or more often, no choice at all, just a weary resignation that I am not a nice-hair-guy.
A lot of it comes down to haircuts.
My first memories of getting my hair cut is two fold. The first being done by my father. For a brief window, he took it upon himself to cut my and my two brothers' hair. I don’t believe he ever did the same for my sister, but it’s not outside the realms of possibility. It’s one of those experiences from my childhood that I can remember quite vividly. Set up on the cracked concrete of our driveway, sitting on a stool, a towel around my neck, and fear percolating away inside my belly.
I’m about to paint my dad in a bad light, but before I do I want to acknowledge there are two sides to every story and maybe my memory is skewed thanks to the extremities of being a kid. Okay, that done, haircuts with Dad were slowly becoming terrifying. It wasn’t a question of if he was going to cut us, but when. He was basically giving us a shaved head, but whether it was the clippers or the scissors, at some point there was going to be a moment when metal met skin. My greatest memory of this wasn’t even my own haircut but my twin brother, Jonathan’s. Dad nicked the back of his ear, the part where it joined his head, and with blood dripping down his side, berated Jonathan for moving. And hey, maybe he did. We were fearful kids and after the first few cuts, a terrified waiting kicked in for when the next one was going to happen, with us flinching at every trim around our ears.
So, haircuts with Dad were a heart racing experience that left me with my adrenaline up and my hands shaking. My first memory of going to an actual hairdresser was the opposite.
I’m sure it wasn’t my first haircut that I’m remembering here, but it is likely to be the first one since my long term memory actually kicked in. In this memory, it is just me and my mum at the hairdressers, which admittedly already seems false as, as a sibling of four, one of whom is my twin, it was rare to do anything with just me and one of my parents. Still, let’s go with that. So, Mum had taken me to get my haircut and I did all the usual, sat in the chair, had the giant bib/apron put around my neck, communicated in some way what I wanted (this part was likely done by mum as aside from being a fearful child I was also a shy one, and I also doubt I had any real idea of how I wanted my hair to be cut), and with all this done the hairdresser got to work.
I remember her talking to me as she cut, but talking to my mum mostly, which was fortunate as I was doing everything in my power not to fall asleep. Something about being in a chair with a cover over me and the equivalent of a head massage happening up top immediately put me in a trance where sleep lay just on the other side of it. Of course, I didn’t want to fall asleep, doing so would be embarrassing, for one, and could easily lead to a hairdressing disaster, for two, but I had to fight that urge with everything inside of me. In truth, this odd sleepiness still kicks in when I go to get my hair cut, but never as bad as that first day where I had to fight like a boxer six rounds in just to keep my eyes open. As we left, Mum even asked if I was okay, noting how non-communicative I had been. I, now fully awake, explained my predicament in exasperated tones, wanting to know the answer to how people freaking stayed awake during a haircut!
While we’re on the topic of haircuts, can we also talk about the strangeness of having to stare directly into your own reflection for twenty plus minutes? That’s far more eye contact than I’m used to, even if it is with myself.
On reflections, I feel like I can easily picture my own from that day. As if I, adult Damian, am sitting in that chair with a boy who is falling asleep looking back at me. I can see him easily, dressed in his blue and maroon school uniform, getting what was likely a horrific bowl cut, eyes squinting closed but using every bit of his strength and will power to keep them a little bit open. I can feel his nervousness and uncertainty, worried about being around adults, but equally worried about having to talk to other kids too, looking forward to getting back to his house, his room, and getting lost in a book. He doesn’t like haircuts. They are too vulnerable, requiring a small temporary spotlight with an audience of one, and yet even that feels like too much. They are a social ordeal he has yet to figure out, and won’t for years to come, and is simply an experience to get through.
I see that boy and recognise him not as myself but certainly as a part of me.
Now, let’s fast forward to a few years later. I am in year eight, somewhere between thirteen and fourteen, and have just discovered hair gel. As you can imagine, I’m using too much of it. My hair is longer here, and, as would be a running theme in my life, I have no idea what to do with it. But everyone else is using hair gel and so I will as well. Mostly, I just squish it in. Running it through my blonde locks, pushing them one way then the next, adding more until eventually, once it’s dried, my whole head is a thick mess that is rock hard while somehow also looking wet. This would continue for years.
The worst point in this era, or at least the one I look back on with the most cringe, is a particular event, a school event, where for some reason I gelled my hair up. I can’t remember exactly what the school event was but for some reason it empowered me to try something different, and so with a head full of hair gel, rather than use my finger to simply muss my hair and let it fall, I ran them upwards, into the sky, my hair following along. I suspect I looked somewhat like a human dandelion, only with less natural delicacy and more tween boy who’s been electrocuted. For the day, it was fine, everyone was dressed up and looking different, but, what would prove to be a semi disastrous occurrence, a girl I had a crush on, not even truly understanding at that point that it was a crush, complimented the look. Well, like every hopeless dude doing what he can to impress, I wore that look for the next few weeks.
I’m happy to say there was one positive outcome, hairwise, during my tween/teen era. The school formal. Year eleven. My dandelion puff is long gone and I’m back to a mussy gelled mop. I’m seventeen, dressed in a suit for the first time, feeling very adult and about to go to the town hall to do some choreographed dancing with the rest of my classmates. One problem, my hair looks it's usually level of dishevelment, which for tonight, just won’t do.
My older sister was dating a guy at the time who was several more degrees of cool than I will ever be, and he, knowing what to do with hair and colognes and fashion and other such things I would spend a lifetime not really bothering to understand, stepped in to save the day. He worked a miracle. He somehow, using the exact same hair gel I would commit follicular crimes with everyday, shaped and styled my hair so that it had an actual look to it. I’ll be honest; I. Looked. Incredible. I could have just walked off the set of the OC! I didn’t know what had happened! I was not a nice-hair-guy and yet somehow he had proven that potentially I could be. And let me tell you, with the confidence of a quality hair styling, I danced like a champion.
I’m sorry to say, this look didn’t stick. I didn’t have the eye for what he’d done nor could really understand it, and so try as I might I was never able to recreate that look. But for one glorious night, my hair ascended to the heavens.
That teenage me, hopeful but clueless, wanting something but with no understanding of how to get it, he also looks back at me from the hairdresser mirror some days. He is not too far removed from who I am now. I can still feel his insecurity, that continuing shyness, an unfortunate lack of self-esteem that he has yet to recognise, but also the small seed of self assurance buried somewhere within, that will slowly grow over time. And when I see him, I remember that for a few days, both rightly and wrongly, his hair made him feel confident. It gave him something that would otherwise take years to foster, and that is worth all the hair gel in the world.
So let’s move forward now to when my hair began to betray me. To be fair, I feel like the betrayal is somewhat warranted. I had neglected my hair for so long, doing nothing with it, not styling, not cutting, mostly I just let it grow as long as I could get away with until I begrudgingly went to the hairdressers where they would ask me how I would like it cut, to which I never really had an answer. The same as it is now, but shorter? Would often be my response, which was really just passing the buck to them to decide. They would do whatever it was they would do, which I was fine with as inevitably I would just let it grow back into the mop I was used to. So, given all this, can I really blame my hair for beginning to thin?
No, I can’t, and yet when I noticed it, or more correctly my hairdresser did, I still felt betrayed. It went like this, I was at my hairdressers getting the mop reduced, her scissors were snipping a staccato as she chatted in time with them, a mostly one sided conversation, and she was telling me about how a previous customer of hers, another guy around my age, was already balding. She looked at my hair and said, Yours seems okay, though, which pleased me, and I voiced an agreement. Then, she paused, took a closer look at the top of my head, and in the most flippant way possible said, ‘Oh, no, there it is.’
And that’s how I found out I was thinning.
Thinning, not balding, not yet, but I did have a few balding men in my family. My fathers own hairline had retreated away from his forehead like a wave washing back out to sea, and my older brother's hair had likewise started to depart for places unknown. I assume I felt what all men do when they notice this loss for the first time, a deep well of melancholy. For the loss of the hair, yes, and what it would mean for my appearance going forward, but more for what it represented. I was ageing, or more correctly, I had tipped over into the point of my life where ageing was no longer a positive, a thing to be longed for, but a severe and terrifying negative. A downhill slope, a move away from the peak that I hadn’t even realised or felt like I had reached. I was angry. I was sad. I was in mourning, not for the hair, but for myself, as this felt like the beginning of something.
I passed through the seven stages of grief, and when I reached acceptance, I doubled down. I decided that I didn’t want to be one of those guys with a ring of hair around the backs of their head and a you’re-fooling-yourself fluff on top and so I bought a pair of razors and shaved it all off.
And so here we enter my shaved head years. This look worked two-fold, because not only did it hide my thinning hairline, making the balding seem like a choice, but it also meant that I no longer had to go to the hairdressers.
Despite now being in my twenties, I had still never mastered being at the hairdressers. Aside from the strange sleepiness that would inevitably overtake me, I seemed to lose the art of conversation. This problem was location specific. Outside of a hairdresser, I could make small talk with the best of them, but in a hairdressers, sitting in that seat, staring at myself in the mirror, words seemed to fail me. I was back to being that shy boy, scared of getting cut, or falling asleep, or hoping my mum would do the talking for me. But, shaving a head to a uniform length dictated by the reach of the plastic sheath that covered the shears was a job I could do myself…mostly.
I was pretty happy when I realised this. I just saved myself twenty bucks a month, got out of ever having to go to a hairdresser again, and my hair required no preparation or thought before heading out for the day. Thankfully, I had a head that looked okay shaved. There were no weird lumps or bumps that were uncovered, and with my mostly round dome, the look was an easy one to pull off.
And so this went on for years. Once every few weeks, I would get out the clippers, stand in front of the mirror, and let the hair fall around me like sharp pointy pieces of rain. It wouldn’t be until a four month trip to Europe that I would finally let my hair grow back, mostly due to not wanting to carry clippers with me for the entire trip.
Once my hair managed to regain some length, I had a startling realisation. The thinning wasn’t that bad. It was there, sure, but I still very much had a full head of hair. In fact, it hadn’t really developed any further than when it was first pointed out to me which of course had led me to shave my head and keep it shaved for almost a decade.
There was a chance I had overreacted.
That me, wearing a shaved head both as an act of defiance against his own ageing and as a convenient way to not have to style it, regularly looks out at me from the hairdresser mirror. He’s almost always there, I just need to turn my head slightly to see him, and I recognise him both as the start of something and a stepping stone to the person I’ve become. While I can now see the shaving was an overreaction, it also symbolised a change in mindset. An ownership over the course of my hair, and my life. During my shaved head years, I headed out on a two month solo trip to the States where I would meet my future wife. I left a career in science and took the first steps towards one in writing. I met new people, took chances, and said yes. It wasn’t all because of the shave, but the shave regularly reminded me that I didn’t have to be passive, that I could take action, if I wanted to.
So, I grew my hair out once more. At first, it looked terrible thanks to being all the same length, which my hairdresser, the same one who had alerted me to my thinning hairline years before, was quick to point out. Of course, I was still left with the same conundrum I’d had as a boy and a teen and that I had mostly avoided in my twenties. I still didn’t know what to do with it. So, I took the route most men of a certain age do. I got a short back and sides, longer on top. There is a good reason for that. It looks neat, only takes about twenty minutes in the chair, and is easy to maintain since it's really just the dollop of hair on top that you have to worry about.
Saying that, my hair is still my hair, and comes with the same quirks and difficulties I started this whole post with. On a recent trip to the hairdressers, while getting it cut by the same hairdresser who believes is saying what she thinks, social norms be damned, after a period of her cutting and me sitting in silence, she came out with, ‘Your hair is quite challenging!’ I laughed and told that I well and truly knew.
Since then, I’ve let it grow a little more beyond a short back and sides, and now, while still moppish, there is some shape and even a touch of style to this challenging hair. I like it. It feels like a combination of all the hair styles I’ve had before. Nice enough to give me confidence, low maintenance enough that it’s still comfortable. I feel like I finally figured out what to do with it.
And now, when I sit at the hairdressers and look at myself in the mirror and see all those other Damian’s looking out at me, I like that too. In many ways, I’m often surprised to see this man looking back at me. This adult person, fully grown and then some, this future me I could only hypothesise about until now. It makes me realise, I had always thought of my future self as someone separate to me. A figure I couldn’t yet know. But, in truth, he and I are the collection of all the versions of myself who have come before, and all their various hair stylings.
And I think that’s true for all of us. That we all have our past selves hiding inside of us somewhere, peering out, and that maybe it just takes twenty plus minutes of staring into your own reflection to see them.
Anyway, I’m off to get a haircut, but thank you so much for reading these Stray Thoughts and until next time if you do see your past selves in the mirror, be sure to say hi to them from me.