Body Art as an Act of Defiance

I’ve always had long hair. My father insisted that my sister and I never cut our hair, so we perpetually looked like Samara/Sadako from “The Ring.” My father and my mother were divorced, but at one point, they tried to make it work and she moved in with us for a short time.

Things were not going well, and as a seven-year-old, I didn’t know at the time, or couldn’t tell, that she was planning her exit strategy. My father worked long, hard shifts as an engineer, so when he’d get home, he’d have an afternoon nap.

It was during this nap that our mother coaxed my sister and I to the bathroom. She cut our long, dark hair so that we both had pixie cuts. She cleaned up the mess, put the scissors away, grabbed a duffle bag, and left. When my father woke-up, he was furious. Our mother was gone again, for good, and his daughters’ precious hair had been cut shorter than it had been since we were babies.

This is probably where I learned that cutting my hair was an act of defiance. I know that many other people do a drastic hair change in times of transition, but to this day, decades later, cutting my hair is an act of defiance. Cutting my long, thick hair short proclaims to the world, “You may have knocked me down, but I got back up, swinging.”

When my high school sweetheart dumped me in senior year of high school, I went into the bathroom and cut my long hair. I was distraught, and crying, but I felt the need to defy the world again. I had a thought somewhere along the lines of, “I’m not your precious little Mimi and I’m not going to follow your rules. If I do or I don’t, either way, I feel pain.”

This has been a particularly challenging year. I think almost everyone can admit the same. For me, in addition to stress and disruptions to “normal” life due to the pandemic, I’ve had increased stress at work, relationships fraught with boundary issues, and finding that increasingly, I’ve become less and less myself.

I used to dye my hair pink, and all other colors of the rainbow. This was acceptable at an old job of mine, but I moved to a different corporation where non-natural hair colors was less acceptable. When I was interviewing, I cut my hair short to get rid of the colorful parts of my hair, which felt incredibly wrong. Cutting my hair was, in that case, a way to conform.

However, I’m feeling more and more suffocated and tired of the rules of my corporation, and realized that I’ve been becoming less and less myself. Three weeks ago, I couldn’t sleep. I was angry, and felt my old defiance. I went into the bathroom and cut my once again long hair to look like Ramona Flowers’ haircut in “Scott Pilgrim Versus the World.” I then added peroxide to some of my hair and used OverTone to make the bleached portions of my hair red. I ordered Inbox tattoos and decorated as much of my skin as I could.

Granted, OverTone and Inkbox are temporary. The first tattoos I created have already faded away, and the red OverTone is starting to wash out. However, while I’m still being compliant to my corporation, I wanted to have some aspects of my younger, freer self that could do whatever she wanted.

Then I realized that I was re-defining myself. It wasn’t just about my hair, or my tattoos. These impermanent changes were ways to figure out who I am yet again, and what I want. I can’t become a previous version of myself, but I can chip away at the cookie-cutter persona that I’ve created to find the authentic me underneath. I will continue to do this with every body art tool that I have, and then maybe, just maybe, I can feel just a little bit of freedom.