If there’s one thing that major fashion magazines have ever gotten right, it’s that there really is a look for every occasion.
For me, a big pajama shirt (sans any effort to look like I didn’t just get out of bed) is the only way to go when agonizing over SAT math problems or vegging out to Twin Peaks and Gilmore Girls. I wish the same could be said of my appearance when I’m out with my friends or eating dinner with my family, but how I look tends to change depending on what I do and where I am.
Clothes are great because you can change them all you want. But what about the things you can’t just change on command, like the length of your hair after a bad haircut?
Bad haircuts. We’ve all had different ways of dealing with them. As a child and later on as a moody preteen, my immediate response to any bad haircut would be to cry and spend the next few months with my hair tied up and hidden from what I thought would be a harsh and judgmental world.
Until today, I hadn’t had a bad haircut in at least two years. But pushing all the bitter feelings aside, I’ve learned a few things after having yet another four inches of my hair chopped off.
To cut a long story short, I had my fourteen-year-old sister cut my hair today. (Yes, at home, using kitchen scissors and an oversized piece of poster paper to catch all of the chopped hair.) After a few minutes, one side of my hair was at least two inches shorter than the other, and the two inches I asked to be chopped off had suddenly turned into four.
I’m a firm believer that outward appearances aren’t everything, but I never felt my best when my hair fell above my collarbone. And so naturally, I didn’t take my new look very well.
At first I thought that this short and seemingly superficial experience was a lesson to not let other people chop off large chunks of my hair without putting much thought into it. But after a while, I was madder at myself for getting so worked up about a mere four inches of my hair getting cut off. Sure, my appearance for the next two to three months would change, but I didn’t like that part of my self-confidence was so dependent on something as trivial as the length of my hair.
I wondered why I felt like my successes in the next few months would be drowned out by my choppy and uneven locks as a result of a bad and spontaneous haircut. How am I going to go back to school? How long will it take before I can look normal again? Why was I so stupid as to let my sister cut my hair???
I thought, if I continued to be the type of person whose self-confidence either grew or diminished after just a slight change in physical appearance, it was likely that I wasn’t as sure of myself as I thought I was.
I’m still in the process of learning and trying to share with others that self-confidence should come from knowing what you’re capable of and having your own set of beliefs and interests to define you. There’s nothing wrong with using your outward appearance as a gateway to self-care and self-expression, but nothing should trump the feeling of pride that can come from a collection of great pieces you’ve written, stellar test scores you know you studied all night for, or even the sheer genius of the pop culture and old rock bands you obsess about from time to time.
We’ve all been through bad haircuts and there’s no denying that they don’t induce the best feelings in the world. Some might reassure us that “the hair will grow back” and that “nobody really pays attention to the way you look anyway.” But not even that should matter, because there are other more important things that we can channel our energies into. And besides, whether or not someone else is paying attention, we as individuals should be the only ones with a say in how our appearance can affect us.
Being comfortable with your appearance is paramount to being comfortable with everything else that makes you who you are. So the next time you get a bad haircut or accidentally shave your eyebrows off, just remember that there’s so much more to you than the minor details that sometimes play too much of a role in the image of yourself that you want others to see. It might take a lot of work, but it’s always a lot better than crying your eyes out or declaring a period of hibernation after going through anything that might make you unnecessarily afraid of facing the world.
Image (c) Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedel
