At the time, I didn't really think about why I had decided to do this... although I do remember that way back in my sophomore year -- before I found my home with the theater crowd -- I used to hang out with a small, strange group of guys at lunch. They would talk about the kung fu movie that had been on the previous Saturday night, the various exploratory expeditions they took into their neighborhood's storm drains, and seemed obsessed with accurately emulating the drawing style of six-year olds. I didn't really fit in with this crowd, but I didn't seem to fit in anywhere else anyway. The reason I hung out with them is merely that they seemed to accept me as one of their own. I did watch the Saturday night kung fu movie and had a working knowledge of Monty Python, but that was the only touchpoint I had with them. They contributed one lasting thing to my psyche, however, which was the nickname "The Man With the Flowing Hair". They must have dubbed me this because I was getting a little shaggy; then, as now, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about how long it had been since my last haircut.
Later, at the end of my high school career, I made the conscious decision to stop cutting my hair. Perhaps I wanted to live up to the only nickname I ever had in high school, or (more likely) I knew that I was about to start moving into the next stage of my life, and was looking make some kind of radical change to mark the occasion.
It's not like I was the only guy around with long hair, of course. This was the tail end of the 80s, and long hair had been the hallmark of rock bands for quite a while. A change was starting, though. I seemed to notice it more as Metallica slowly moved from garage band into the mainstream... hair was changing from a moussed-up symbol of glam excess into a legitimate, serious statement, that rare form of rebellion that can actually be achieved with literally no effort.
I let my hair grow throughout that summer, and by the time I started attending U of M in the fall, it had officially reached the "awkward" stage. It wasn't quite long in the traditional sense of the word, but at least long enough to flip up at the ends, especially when it was humid. I had my student ID picture taken on a rainy day, and it looked like I had done the old 60s trick of using orange juice cans as rollers all around the bottom.
I might have stopped then, but if I was having any second thoughts about my hairstyle, it was dispelled by a fellow student in my freshman English class. His hair was uniformly long and awesome-looking, and it looked like it just grew that way, which I mistakenly thought would happen to mine if I just could get it long enough.
My choice of era to start growing my hair turned out to be fortuitous. In 1991 grunge swept in, making long hair stylish again, and I had a substantial headstart on guys who wanted to look more like Chris Cornell or Eddie Vedder. On a blustery winter day almost two years after I had started consciously growing it, I was walking through a passage between two university buildings, and a gust of wind blew my hair so that it got stuck in the corner of my mouth for the first time.
After that, I realized I wanted to give it some sort of shape instead of just letting it grow wild, so I decided to keep the front trimmed just enough to make it look like it was long and swept back. Here I made my second possibly mistaken assumption: that it wouldn't look like a mullet. That hairstyle had already been moved into mainstream consciousness by Mr. Billy Ray Cyrus, but hadn't yet become synonymous with "redneck". I don't think my choice of style went that far, but I was probably walking a dangerously fine line.
Nobody at home seemed to object to my choice, which in retrospect seems strange. I never heard a negative word from my parents, grandparents, or girlfriend. In fact, my younger brother took a stab at growing his out similarly, for a while. Maybe they knew better than I did that I was looking for a kind of handle for my identity. The beginning of college is a bewildering time for everyone, trying to find your bearings in a situation that is so alien (and alienating) than anything you've known before...
But through those college years, and even after, my long hair was my calling card. There were only one or two other guys in the Men's Glee Club (my only social circle) that had similarly long hair. I suppose it gave me a little boost of confidence when, standing along with up to sixty other identically-dressed men, I had something that made me somewhat unique.
I kept the hairstyle for over ten years, all the way up until the summer of 1999. I had been silently thinking about it for a week or two, when I turned to that girlfriend who had been so supportive and in the interim had become my wife, and said, "I think I'm ready to get rid of this." She made an appointment for me with her hairdresser, and I had it done. I didn't get it as short as I currently have it, but back to my high school length. It was another five years (and a little bit more thinning) before I switched to the length I have now.
Looking back at it now, I'm noticing how my hairstyle choice then actually fits into my current personal philosophy, which must have been forming back then even though I wasn't aware of it. In my search for a way to visually define myself, I was stating that I didn't think there was anything else particular noticeable about myself.
This philosophy has two seemingly contradictory sides: first, that every person is utterly, entirely unique; and second, that no one is particularly special. It's this second part that seems to go against the grain of everything we're taught in Western society, so let me see if I can explain my thoughts on it a little more fully... It's a given that each of us is an almost infinitely complex tapestry of genetics and experience. We're dropped into a particular time, a particular place, and particular circumstances that we have no choice about. And all things being equal, none of us holds a particularly privileged place in any of it.
Think of all the people in your life, spread out around you in a sort of bulls-eye pattern. Everyone's is different, but for example, say that closest to you is your family: kids, spouse, siblings, parents. Moving farther out are your closest friends, then an ever-widening circle of less familiar friends, acquaintances, ranging all the way out to people you might have spoken to once. Now consider that you are also represented somewhere in the patterns of everyone else in your pattern. It's this change from ego-centric to omni-centric thinking that should make you realize how peripheral you are in almost everyone's life but your own.
I'm not saying that as individuals we're unimportant. In fact, I'm saying that we're all equally important. When you stop thinking that other people are inherently better or worse than you, a whole raft of possibilities become open to you. 90% of what you think you can't do is actually within your reach. It's really just a matter of application, what you're willing to put yourself through to get there. The trick is finding your natural talents and following them.
I think this pursuit of something to physically distinguish themselves is really people looking to find their "thing", the hook that makes them easily recognizable. For some it's a particular profession, for others it's a pop cultural obsession, or in my case, a hairstyle. There's a comfort in knowing something definite in a mass of humanity that are all headed in different directions.
I really wasn't aware of an ulterior motive for letting my hair grow at the time, but clearly I had one. I thought I needed something to make me memorable, when really it was my thoughts and actions that I should have been focusing my attention on. It took ten years for me to have the confidence let go of that particular piece of vanity.
So, did it ultimately work for me? Did I really gain anything by growing out my hair? Well, the answer is yes and no. While I think I did garner a certain amount of confidence from it, I don't think there's one positive experience or personal connection that I made with anyone that was at all influenced by it. As we all should eventually learn, you're not defined by your defining characteristic.
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