here is my essay on why i’m a katie girl
(for an explanation of the whole project, see the entry directly below this):
i am a katie girl because i have big hair. anyone that knows me, knows this. when i was born i had chestnut brown ringlets covering my entire head and the nurses tied in three pink bows. i am a katie girl because the feminist in me questions this sometimes. that i had a socially constructed gender identity at less than an hour old.
but back to my hair.
when i was two or three it started growing in blond. my mom has a lock of my hair that is half blond and half brown. it also straightened out. but it was still big and thick, and when i was in kindergarten my mom used to crimp it and put it in a side ponytail. i was frequently referred to as “lioness” and “large marge” as a child because of it. it became part of my identity.
in high school it was popular to straighten your hair. thin, straight hair was all the rage and my katie girl hair didn’t fit. adolescence had turned it curly and wild again. in the summer it frizzed out and at some point in junior high i had dyed it a bizarre shade of yellow-blond. it didn’t fit in and so neither did i. i used to straighten it everyday, layer by layer, inch by inch, until it was unrecognizable. one day i overslept and when i walked into class one of the guys i went to school with laughed out loud at my katie girl hair. i’ll never forget standing in our physics classroom, humiliated.
when i went to college i started noticing girls on campus who were unapologetic about their katie girl hair. some had dreads and afros, others had pin tight ringlets, and still others rocked amazing pixie cuts. to a vulnerable eighteen year old this bordered on miraculous. at the end of the year, my best friend and i realized that we had the same katie girl hair. at the end of high school, she had cut hers short, much like i had straightened mine. by the end of our freshman year we were embracing our crazy waves (which aren’t exactly curls) and wearing our hair huge. and gorgeous.
i used to hate it when people touched my hair. they were usually commenting on it or trying to smooth it down and it made me feel like i was being violated. i needed people to leave my katie girl hair alone, to just let it be.
i still straighten my hair sometimes. for job interviews and important meetings. it is still patted down by well meaning middle aged women on occasion. i still wear it short because long my katie girl hair is too much. now my friends call it my “sex hair.” i’m okay with this. i also apologize for it frequently. when people say my katie girl hair looks nice i tell them i overslept and didn’t have time to straighten it.
i’m a katie girl because i still don’t feel like i fit. because i think my hair defines me sometimes. because the complicated relationship i have with the way i look is a battle i am still fighting. i don’t look in magazines and see myself, i have to look in the mirror for that. and the person i see there is a katie girl. complicated, happy, judgmental, passionate, driven. and more than a little bit self-conscious about the skin she’s in.
