I hated my hair for a long time. In high school, I’d constantly try to flatten it, annoyed at its stubborn refusal to sit straight on my head like all my other friends, damping it down with bathroom sink water during five-minute bell changes in school. The thick heat of an outdoors-based Florida school didn’t help; by the time classes let out for the day, I was waiting for the bus outside with a bird’s nest on my head and a hatred for global warming, genetics and my body’s inability to conform.
I always acted before my hair got too long, too unruly, opting for haircuts that stifled any growth and would, hopefully, be the one to get rid of my hair’s waves once and for all. There was no personality in it, just a shapeless mass that I wished wouldn’t embarrass me — I wasn’t the victim of external bullying, but internal. I was so upset at the cards life had dealt me, felt it so unfair that I could never be as attractive as the people I looked up to. I remember one time when I showed a barber a picture of YouTuber Cody Ko — a comedy inspiration at the time — as a point of reference for what I wanted. I was shocked that she couldn’t magically turn my hair straight like his, that I was still the same person after I left the chair. This was the summer before college and I still didn’t know better.
I get my hair from my mother — a curly-haired New York Jew who I remember in childhood using copious amounts of mousse whenever she went out, and constantly having to explain to my father the dangers of humidity. Like me, she struggled with accepting her natural curls. Once when I was 3 years old, she had her hair professionally straightened. I cried when she came home; I didn’t recognize her. There was a lesson to be learned in that memory, but it has taken me a couple of decades to get there.
We have a combined 60 years of shame, my mother and I, for our Ashkenazi curls. The turning point for me came during the pandemic, where I rented an apartment with a longtime Jewish friend of mine in Florida. Because of the state’s loose pandemic rules, I didn’t feel great going to a hairdresser, so I just let my hair grow. HAIM’s new album came out, we baked Hanukkah cookies for Taylor Swift. It was a very Jewish time.
I kept growing my hair out, which meant learning how to manage it. I bought creams and shampoos and serums that made it springier or less frizzy or tighter; it took a while to find a routine that works well (and it’s still subject to change). When lockdowns lifted and vaccines started rolling out mid-2021, and my extended family began to see each other again, they all commented on how great my hair looked, how shocking a difference it was from the close-kept cuts prior. It suited me, they all said, and I began to believe it as well. I loved how it felt as I shook my head or how it fell down my forehead — in other words, the irritation I felt at its deviation suddenly transformed into pride.
That fall, I returned to college and ran into a friend I had made on the internet who also wrote for my university’s newspaper. When I mentioned that we had the same curly brown hair, he asked if mine was “natural.” I asked what he meant, and he said that he actually had a perm. I was shocked — I had spent the entirety of my life wishing I could transplant a different hairstyle onto my own, and now people were paying to get my kind of hair. It was a real trip.
Suddenly, I saw my type of hair everywhere: TikToks advertised beauty products for curly hair, or tips to make yours wavier if it wasn’t curly; thousands of commenters professed jealousy of Instagram influencers flaunting their locks; it was agreed-upon that the now-trendy mullet looked best with curly hair (case in point: “RuPaul’s Drag Race”’s contestant Crystal Methyd); classmates wore beachy curls and other guys grew their hair out. Long hair was in, and I had arrived at the zeitgeist after a long, awful road to acceptance.
It’d be easy to get annoyed at these people for adopting a style without the self-hatred I and other Jews go through — my culture is not your costume, etc. — but honestly, it just seems like part of the process of figuring yourself out, a necessary and often challenging stretch of time for a young adult who can open their phone and see hundreds of more attractive people than them on every app they open. Why would I be mad that others can reach self-actualization more easily than I did?
Part of the shame I felt about my hair when I was growing up came from the fact that there weren’t many curly-haired celebrities to find myself in. Every figure of attraction on the TV looked different from me, and curly hair was never portrayed as an asset. Thankfully, now, there’s a roster of gorgeous Jews sporting curly hair who could easily land on a poster in a teen’s room: Timothée Chalamet, Jenny Slate, Josh O’Connor, Ilana Glazer, Larry David — yes, I said it.
There are still so many days I’m upset at how fussy my hair can be — that’s just part of the process of being a (Jewish) person. But now I’m upset whenever I get a haircut that’s too short, and I beam whenever someone at work compliments my hair. I find most talk of ‘healing your inner child’ pretentious and pseudo-psychological, but there is a particular pang of unignorable joy I get when someone’s running their fingers through my hair, or, when I look at the mirror, and think, if only for a second: God, I’m lucky.
