short hair fat face

In The Before, I cut my own hair anyway. My hair is a boring brown and grows past my shoulders. It’s not that hard to just snip the ends myself. And it’s much cheaper. At my last haircut before I took matters into my own hands, the hairdresser was unbelievably young and kept putting her blue metallic scissors in her mouth.

 I don’t have hair scissors like everyone online says you should. I have fabric scissors that I got with a coupon at Joann. When I feel like it, I play hairdresser, dropping my uneven tips into the plastic garbage can that I prop up in my sink. 

Now, in The After, people are obsessed with the idea of cutting their own hair. New listicles pop up every day, proffering the sweet, sweet schadenfreude of pandemic haircut disasters. I spent ten real minutes of my actual life watching a video of a teenage girl cut her hair in big chunks down to her scalp. (I envy her.)

I told Connor that if he wakes up next to a bald-ish version of me, that he should know it is absolutely a cry for help. There have been many 3 a.m.’s when it has come close. There have also been 3 p.m.’s that felt no different. If it happens in the afternoon, I fantasize about taping my hair in a ponytail to the front door so that he knows what he is walking into. 

Partially, I am just absolutely fucking fed up with having dirty hair all of the time. My hair is so thin that it looks filthy the same day I wash it. And because this is The After, I am not even coming close to washing it every day. I can’t exactly figure out how to make this sentiment make sense, but I know that if I shave my head, I will get a yeast infection. Free from the pain of greasy hair slicked down on my scalp, I will probably never shower again. I have faith that I will be able to ignore the filth accumulating over the rest of my body until, and probably after, it requires medical attention. 

I also just think short hair looks dope. I have a dozen pictures of Rosemary’s Baby-era Mia Farrow saved on my phone. But after decades of internalized misogyny and fatphobia, I can’t shake the stigma that fat girls shouldn’t have short hair. I can’t bring myself to give up that one feminine part of my body, which often does not feel feminine, not curvy in the right places. Within the last month, I have googled “short hair fat face” half a dozen times and saved these pictures to my phone alongside Mia Farrow’s. These women seem brave to me, and they look good. 

It is probably not helping that I have been mainlining America’s Next Top Model, devouring eighteen straight seasons over the course of a couple of weeks. That show comes wrapped in fucking layers of problematic bullshit, at the heart of which is the idea of what it means to be beautiful and how beautiful girls can use their beautiful bodies to sell shit in our capitalist nightmare of a country. When Tyra Banks tells a 5’11” girl who weighs conservatively a hundred pounds less than I do that her bone structure and fantastic body can handle something as fierce as a short haircut, I feel happy, proud for that girl and disgusted, repulsed by my lackluster bone structure and the weight it carries. I get mad at my bones. 

It’s not all bad though. I mean it’s mostly bad. But then there are jumpsuits. I aspire to be a jumpsuit-wearing person. In The After, you can Zoom into meetings in a jumpsuit without anyone even knowing, dip your toe (barefoot, obv, nobody wears shoes anymore) into that brave new water. 

I wore one to the grocery store, and a woman in an insane tie-dyed rhinestone dress (no mask) told me she liked my outfit. I smiled (beneath my mask, obv), and repaid the compliment. If I can lie about an outfit, so can she. But fuck it, the world is ending, who cares?

    Now that I have online shopped my way into being a jumpsuit person, maybe the next step is to cut all my hair off, in a way that is not entirely a cry for help.  I think the biggest obstacle--after I work through every shitty thing I’ve internalized about what it means to be fat and have short hair--will be the awkward angle required to reach the back of my head with my Joann scissors.