[MUSIC PLAYING]
PAIGE BRIGHT: It was the winter of my sophomore year. And I remember going up to my friend and telling them that I needed to shave off all of my hair, which was a very interesting place to be at my sophomore year because as a trans person, I very much so experimented with my hair for the past however many years. I came out as trans as a sophomore in high school. And before then, I had had buzz cuts, essentially for most of my life.
And then after I came out as trans, I really started experimenting with my gender expression. I colored my hair, every shade of the rainbow, from puke green, to dark blue, to purple. And that’s what my mom and I would do. I would finish up classes. I would finish up my schoolwork. And I would go spend hours dyeing and bleaching my hair in front of the TV, watching Netflix.
So my senior year, I decided to start experimenting with the length of my hair. I wanted to go for it, see how long I can get it, see how that feels. And then the pandemic hit in 2020. And it became much harder to just maintain my hair.
But also, my freshman year of MIT, I was moving out of the house for the first time. I was starting to figure out my independence and who I was. And I start classes. I focused a lot on my academics and my classes, and I made time for that. I made time to struggle academically because I knew that was expected.
I expected to have a hard time in classes and to spend time working to overcome that. So I did, and I was rewarded for it in various ways. Like, I got the grades that I wanted to, and I impressed my advisor in whatever sense. And it was something that I could maintain, to some extent, and get the results that I wanted to.
And so I just kept doing that. I finished my first semester and then my spring semester. And suddenly I found myself in my sophomore year still keeping up with this, which honestly, was very overwhelming, mentally. I was starting to get a little bit burnt out academically.
But it’s also around the time of my sophomore year that I realized that I haven’t cut my hair in two years-ish, and that’s starting to become an issue. Because I remember at one point that semester, I brushed my hand through my hair, and I feel a knot starting to form in the back of my head. And I think to myself, it’s fine. No one can see this. It’s tucked beneath the hair. It’ll brush out.
But that doesn’t quite happen. Instead what happens is I end up in the winter term over IEP teaching a class. I teach a class in mathematics, which is a subject I love, and it was a class that I wanted to see exist. And this class has lecture videos. And I’m watching them, at one point, trying to review what I’ve covered in the previous lectures. And I noticed that the back of my head just looks like a mess, like it hasn’t been up kept, like I haven’t been maintaining it in any sense of the word.
And I really don’t know what to do about this situation. I start freaking out because this is not how I pictured myself in that classroom. I pictured myself confident and respectable and presenting myself as someone who knows this material. And that was true. But I was very obviously not taking care of myself and my well-being.
And my gut reaction is to shave it all off. I have this problem. I need to not have this problem. That is the way to get there.
But I don’t want to go to a barber or a stylist and say, please do this for me, because I felt really ashamed about this whole situation. It is a level of self care that a mentally healthy person should be doing. But I just wasn’t making that time for myself.
Coming to MIT was this huge marker of independence. I’m moving out of the house. I’m becoming a student. I’m advancing my career, in whatever sense of the word. And being independent was not getting me anywhere good. It was getting me to a point where I needed to get help.
So I reached out to a friend, and I said, do you know anyone? Is there anyone that you know who could help give me a haircut? And they knew another student at MIT who could give me a free haircut.
So I went to them, and I said, let’s shave off all of my hair. It’s not worth my time. It’s not worth your time. Let’s get to the end result.
And the stylist sort of takes a step back and says, it’s good to know that that’s an option. But we don’t have to get there. We don’t have to get there right now. We can take a breath, cut away what needs to be cut away, and go from there.
And so we do. We spend like an hour and a half deep conditioning it and brushing it out and cutting away the pieces that we don’t even want to see anymore. And at the end, I look in the mirror, and I have this femme, lesbian, short haircut that I haven’t had in, like, three, two years. And I feel great. I just feel more myself than I had felt since high school, quite frankly.
And just the kindness and compassion that this person showed me, I don’t know why they gave me that compassion, quite frankly. There’s some aspect of this that maybe they could tell that this was a bigger deal for me than I was letting on. But regardless, the fact that they were able to make this space for me is what helped me get through the rest of my sophomore year.
I don’t feel independent anymore, but in a way that feels really empowering. I’m finding my place here at MIT and finding people who can help support me in ways that I myself would not have been able to manage.