Hair

There was this painting of a very nice and barely dressed woman my brother was working on, and then he dropped LSD while working on her brown hair, and then I guess he just went on tripping on something else and just left it there for me to find. He left short after, heading West, and never came back. I was twelve.

Her hair was fantastic, she had very much lots of it, in cascades of curly wonders, and I liked it a lot. It kind of became a sort of goal, no not goal, a sort of... ideal for me.

There are tons of little episodes of me that I can dig from the past that illustrate, at least for me, the deep calling the whole of me was receiving from my feminine roots. I wanted deeply inside of me to be that sexy woman, with that much curly hair. That's really me, I mean that painting forged me.

It took like 35 more years for me to admit to myself that I'm a woman, even though I have a penis. I'm transsexual... I could have known then. Actually, I did. But it was 1974, so I couldn't, I wasn't strong enough.

I had to face the fact some three or four years later with my then friend  with whom I was analyzing myself, my reaction to things, what I liked, how I was, and he told me: "Everything indicates that you are a woman... you are obviously a transsexual." He told me that, exactly those words. I was sixteen years old, and I knew he was right. Only back then, being trans was like... something from outer space. It meant an automatic exclusion from society, and from sexuality also, for all I knew then about transition is that I would lose all ability to get any kind of orgasm, which was a somewhat important part of my life back then, at sixteen, yeah, like any teen getting an influx of hormones.

But anyways... Hair, that was my topic, yeah... My hair. And also construction of self: when I saw that painting from my brother... Remember, I was twelve years old. This is critical time in one's life. I was searching for myself, I remember I was. That painting went straight up into the building of self part of my teen brain.

I still do want to be that girl, half a century later. And I still do have issues with my hair, and have had all those years that followed, whether long or short, and for good reasons: cowlicks and very fine hair, very difficult to manage... so I learned along the way.

But not easily since I also had this phobia from my earlier youth, of any beauty salons or anywhere it smelled or felt like a hairdresser's place. That phobia was inseminated into my self at age four or five when my Dad used to bring me for the 1966-67 usual hair cut at the barber shop: essentially with the electric clipper. He would run that devilish tool all along my neck... It felt really awful, I can analyse that now, much later: I was really traumatized by that tool, the barber who pretended to know me, his shop, his dirty tools that smelt disgusting, his clipper, his old metal scissors. I hate metal, the smell of it.

Anyways I never was able to feel good at any place where they cut hair so I mainly managed that myself, after difficult attempts at getting over the phobia in my twenties. These times where I stepped on my phobia and met different hairdressers only served to confirm I feel very bad there. So afterwards, mainly, I tried to grow it.

But it failed. And so did the construction of myself. I had to start over mid-forties, admitting to myself that in no way I could be a man. I just don't fit the description, and I don't feel it either.

My hair is still a problem, but I thank my genetics for one thing: I ain't bald at all, so there... I should see the good sides. And I'm blond now.

I wonder if it's the words or the hair that can help make me really feel like a woman. This Winter may tell, as I will be writing... and growing my hair.

Dominique Rock