My hair hasn’t been this short since I was six months old. It’s a strange feeling.

When I was a little girl, my mom used to say if I didn’t want my hair brushed, she’d have to cut it all off. I said, go ahead. I hated having all that hair. It’s thick and frizzy and yellow, and the first thing anyone sees when they look at me. But it quickly became clear that it was the one compliment I was going to get from anyone. As a girl growing up in the 80’s, being weird, funny, or smart wasn’t exactly a jewel in my crown; it was something to be overcome, or dealt with. But when people didn’t know what to say, they could always talk about my hair.

My mom encouraged me to take vitamins to get it to grow, always longer and longer. I’ve always been terrible at taking pills, so I’d spend several minutes every night trying to choke down one of those big rocky vitamins that would make my scalp sprout more and more of the stuff. It grew until it was past my ass—thick, wavy masses of hair that had to be brushed, dried, curled, braided, adorned. If I did something new to it, everyone noticed. Look at the little girl with all that hair!

I never liked doing my hair, but my mother certainly did. The endless battles over brushing, styling, curling made our relationship worse than it already was. For her, I think it was a way of insisting on closeness with me; she’d demand to do my hair or she wouldn’t let me leave the house. So we’d fight and scream until I’d finally submit to let her do as she pleased with it.

When I was in high school, she laid off a bit while I went through my grunge phase. Carefully rolled and styled hair, I argued, did not go with plaid second-hand flannel and ripped jeans. Eventually, she got her hand back in by convincing me that the very coolest thing would be to straighten it through an elaborate ritual of brushing and stretching it in swaths around my head, using my skull as a single, giant curler, for which I’d require her assistance.

I kept it long, down to my ass, all the way through college. When I did theater, my hair was a big part of the characters I played. It practically had lines. I could turn it into an exaggerated Gibson-girl onion, or transform it into complicated Princess-Leia-style braided buns. If I nodded, my hair would bob in assent. One time I gave a presentation in a film class in college, and my professor announced to the class that if someone like me wanted to be taken seriously, I would simply have to do something with my hair. It’s sexy and distracting, and no one can pay attention to a word I say.

So after I finished my final theatrical performance and prepared to graduate, a friend cut it off to the shoulders. I lost ten inches and what felt like pounds. I bagged it up and gave it to an artist friend who was creating textiles out of human hair. Parts of me are probably still showing up in strange woven objects somewhere.

When I told my mother on the phone, she threw up. She put the phone down, vomited, and said she would learn to be OK. I have never figured out why she put so much value on it, except that she seemed concerned that without it, I had no chance at finding love. My hair was all I had. But I kept responding that it’s not as if my hair had made me wildly sexually successful. I had only dated at all in college by practically tricking dudes into going out with me.

I don’t know why it took me ten more years to get around to chopping it all off, except that it seemed really important to other people. If I said I wanted to cut it, I’d get stories from male friends about how they never forgave their mothers for cutting their hair, and this was bringing up all their anxieties about abandonment and loss. Or women would reach out and grab it and say “No! Oh God no!” If having big hair was supposed to be some kind of magical special thing, I’m not sure what the benefits were supposed to be. As I experienced it, big hair meant constantly plucking strays off my clothes, getting strands in my lipstick, reducing my field of vision, feeling boiling hot in the summer, having awkward make-outs (excuse me pleh), and looking like a perpetually unfashionable woman-child.

So I did it. It’s not shaven-short, but it’s boy-short. Most people are supportive. But one young man in one of my classes gave me a long, sorrowful look. “You shouldn’t have done it.” For you? People have been having opinions about what’s on my head for so long I can’t possibly care anymore.