A week ago Friday I got six inches chopped off of my hair. It was a considered decision in that I had been thinking casually about it for some time, and a snap decision in that I was surprised to find myself telling my hairdresser exactly what I wanted him to do. My hairdresser worked at a nuclear power plant for years, pushing buttons and making measured decisions until he could no longer resist the lure of cosmetology school. He has been a hairdresser for an equal number of years, and if I think that I, as an attorney, keep secrets and counsel people through hard times, I have nothing on him. All of which is to say  this:  He is a man familiar with those decisions that are a weird amalgam of considered and snap, and he wants to make sure that they are more of the former and less of the latter. So with my head leaning backward, chin pointing to the ceiling, still-long hair sudsing, I found myself on the receiving end of a miniature psychological examination, hairdresser-style, about exactly why I wanted a drastic haircut.

I had not really thought about the why, so even I was curious about my answer, which turned out to be “It’s just not me these days.” This answer earned me the haircut, which I loved ferociously for the 90 seconds it took me to walk from the front door of the salon to my car. When I pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror, I nearly burst into tears. What had I done?

As I drove home from the salon, I thought about a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and on the drive, I had convinced myself that the moral of the story was that Bernice suddenly felt liberated by her shorn locks, sure-footed in her path, and ultimately more confident and beautiful. But I have noticed a real problem in a 28 year hiatus from reading a story, and that is that I tend to forget exactly what happened. Chris apparently does not, for when I walked in and exclaimed, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,  baby!,” he said, “Don’t be silly. You look a whole lot better than Bernice did.”

What?

A trip to the bookshelf and a discreet read later, I realized that I had gotten it all wrong. Bernice visits her cousin Marjorie and laments the lack of male attention. Marjorie tells her to engage the men, and Bernice obliges by telling them all that she is going to bob her hair and that they should come watch. Soon Bernice’s dance card is full; Marjorie simmers jealous and ignored in a corner; and Marjorie calls Bernice’s bluff. Bernice bobs her hair. And it looks terrible.

In my circumstances, I liked my version better.

I have been thinking a lot lately about being a woman in general, and a middle-aged woman in particular. It started a few weeks ago when I saw on Facebook a video version of “This is My Fight Song.” I find it a genuinely awful song, but I could not help myself: It had smiling celebrities and bright colors and quick cutaway shots, all to the end of being a musical version of a Little Debbie Swiss Cake Roll. (I devoured it quickly. I could not help myself. And I felt slightly sick after.) But at one point, Eva Longoria grabs the mic, and she shouts, “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?” I recognized the tone in her voice, the flash in her eyes. She was angry. I burst into tears. And I wondered why I was angry, too.

About a week later, I read an essay about why women drink, written by a woman who had quit drinking. She discussed the plight of the modern-day woman and referred to an Enjoli commercial that I memorized, loved, sang, and danced to in the mid-70s: I can bring home the bacon/Fry it up in a pan/And never let you forget you’re a man/Because I’m a woman. After a brief reenactment of that commercial in my office, voice in tune and imaginary frying pan in hand, I continued reading. The essayist wrote about the wine culture in women (apparently every birthday card she could find for a friend referenced wine), the escapism brought about by drinking, and her own experience on a panel at work, where men dramatically recharacterized her job and her role and the company, glossing over the hard parts. She wrote that she wanted to yell, “Don’t tell me how to feel!”

And just for fun, I have thought about how women report feeling invisible as they age. I had read this before, and I did not know exactly why, and then the game changed: In the last six months, I have fallen victim to middle-aged weight gain.

I thought that my body and I had entered into an uneasy truce: I would eat right and exercise, and it would stay the same. So I upheld my end of the bargain, getting up every morning to take care of it, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, unstrapping the feed bag at the right moment. But in the last six months, it has gained eight pounds. Eight pounds despite Pilates and dance classes and weights and spin. Eight pounds despite portion control and lots of spinach and only one square of dark chocolate per day. Eight pounds! Apparently, as women’s bodies age and estrogen levels drop, their bodies develop a coping mechanism: an average weight gain of ten pounds, mostly in the middle, since fat produces estrogen.

And here it all was, waiting for me to unpack: anger, not being heard, being told how to feel, feeling invisible, being betrayed by my body. It’s enough to make a girl want to reach for a glass of wine — except that I don’t drink much these days, since it feels like poison.  It may even be enough for a girl to blame the patriarchy. But I don’t. I thought about times that I have wanted to yell, “CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?,” and in most of those times, I thought about how I bit my tongue. Perhaps the first step toward being heard is simply speaking up. I thought about the essay about drinking, and I thought about how that problem really wasn’t only a woman’s problem. I have known plenty of men caught in the cross-hairs of competing societal expectations, men who wallow in their own bouts of unhappiness, men who are being told what to do and what to feel. And I thought about those damn eight pounds.

About half of my clothes still fit. The other half — clothes bought during bouts of extreme stress, clothes bought as aspirational sizes, clothes bought even if slightly too tight — hung in my closet, scathing indictments each one. (Of what?, I wondered. Of my inability to escape biology?) But I continued to hold on. I should mention here that I become attached to my clothes, even to the point that I name many of them. There is, for instance, The Kitten Dress (a velvet leopard print jumper that is 15 years old), The Picnic Skirt (an enormous round skirt made from an old red and white checked tablecloth), The Flapper (a black knit dress with sewn-on pearl necklaces). How could I bag up old friends?

And then it hit me. I decided to throw the clothes a retirement party, where I would toast each discarded piece, think about the good times we had, and envision a new, better life, complete with time for it to pursue other interests having been released from my service. I came awfully close to serving up champagne, but in addition to the inevitable headache, I figured that drinking in my closet at 11:08 on a Saturday morning might be the final straw in Chris’ picture of my good mental health. The Kitten Dress, The Picnic Skirt, The Flapper stayed. The Rubik’s Cube Skirt, Amy Lee in the Rain (a black trench), The French Secretary (a grey sweater vest), Baby Aspirin (a cotton cardigan) did not. The pile grew. My anxiety subsided.

Surrounded by my vestments, my armor, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Yes, there was slightly more of me, and as much as I tell myself that it just means more of me to love, more of me to contain all this awesomeness, it still stings. But I am not angry. I can be heard. I can speak up. I can wear these bright clothes with funny names. I can dance. I can shake my shorn hair, unencumbered by the old. I can be more visible than I ever was before, unafraid to speak my mind and act like myself. And all of this, my friends, is a lot.

ALC

P.S. — I started this blog in September 2014, and this is my 100th post. From the bottom of my heart, thank you all so much for reading. It has meant so much to me.

And as it turns out, the long hair really wasn’t me these days.