point, the most difficult question to answer became
why I decided to change my hair into locks in the
first place.
This is a valid and common question, with a
well-rehearsed response that amounts to “I felt
like it.” The natural follow up, at least in my mind,
is, “why do you keep them,” but I do not remember anyone ever asking. It remains a challenging
question and the question I struggled to answer
for seven hours, damp and in pain both physically
and emotionally, while combing out the nubs of
my locks.
The easy answer is that I got tired of having long
hair; hair that takes nearly twelve hours to dry
poses its difficulties. I think the change in how
people perceived me is a more evocative explanation, but it works both ways: being passively judged
for my hairstyle was the new normal and I adjusted accordingly. Over the years, I had become
something of a campus landmark. People I had
never met knew me by description immediately,
and I do not doubt that they had identified the
correct “gingerdread man.” I have mixed feelings
about other people having a perception of me
despite having no connection to them.
I think the more accurate answer is that I viewed
removing my locks as a social experiment, to test
if I could notice the difference in how friends and
strangers treated me and to see how that affected how I viewed myself. Former acquaintances
rarely recognize me unless I go out of my way to
reintroduce myself. To a large degree, it was like
a partial reset to my social life. Friends still know
who I am, but people I am not as close with see
52
Squad
me as a vaguely familiar face that they cannot
quite place.
I had expectations of how cutting my locks would
play out—no more people yelling “Sweet dreads,
dude,” strangers offering narcotics, or people
touching my hair. The day after I cut my locks
though, a stranger yelled across the street complimenting my ’fro. I forgot I still had red hair and
two of those three examples were irritating long
before I locked up my hair. At no point did I see
a stranger in the mirror. I looked much younger
without locks, but the face in the mirror was undeniably familiar. A year after cutting my locks, I
cannot look in a mirror and picture the same face
looking back with ropes of hair. My self-perception
is independent of my hair, but how others perceived
me after losing my locks inevitably changed.
— Thomas Marren