Shear Strength

"How cutting my hair helped me own my power"

- Hannah W. Duane

I’d been joking for years that I should just shave my whole head. I never thought my long hair looked all that great. I never knew what to do with it. It always got sweaty and gross when I was out hiking or climbing—and I hated feeling pressured to style it in the morning before school. But more than just an inconvenience and a total waste of time, it also felt like an attachment to some old-fashioned idea of femininity.

Whenever I mentioned shearing it all off, my friends would laugh along with me—vaguely uncomfortable and with the understanding it would never happen. I was simply not *that* girl. I’d had the same hair for my whole life.

But that ended last fall when I started freshman year at a new high school for the arts. I was suddenly surrounded by this really diverse group of students— theater boys in makeup and pajamas, visual arts girls who dressed exclusively in yellow, writers in thrifted clothes and funky glasses.

Instead of being amused or incredulous when I mentioned my aspirations for a shortcut, they’d just look at me and ask, “Then why haven’t you done it yet?”