10:34am February 10, 2012

I’m shedding. A lot.

This is the longest my hair has been since I was a teenager. And I’m getting some insight into why under the surface my hair was always a huge matted mess.

The shape of my hairs is extremely varied.

At one end there’s these hairs with very gentle waves shaped like elongated integral signs.

Then you get ones that have very deep curvy waves.

And then there’s ones that are outright curly, usually corkscrew-shaped, with different extents of the curliness.

But that’s not all. There’s also lots of hairs that start out as one thing and end up as another. And there’s lots of shapes I can’t even describe, they’re so irregular.

A lot of the curly and irregular ones are beneath the least-wavy surface hairs, and towards the back, where the worst mats always were.

So apparently my tangle problem came from having incredibly curly hair under the surface and in the back. That goes well with the pattern of the tangles – sometimes I could end up with a perfectly brushed surface and nightmarish tangles underneath. And then if someone did detangle them they’d find at the core, either hairs that had somehow tied themselves in knots, or two hairs that had twisted together and knotted.

Something that’s actively annoying my sense of symmetry is that my left side has deeper waves and more curls than the right.

Caring for this is going to get way too interesting. But I’m really sick of shaving my head and I have always liked it long, so meh.

(And no, this has nothing to do with gender and never has. Hair just hasn’t got that kind of significance to me. People have often tried to force various gender identities onto me by virtue of hairstyle. They’ve always – always – been completely wrong. Same with clothing. These are just not gendered things to me. I’m very bad at absorbing gender information of any kind.)

1 note