Before my freshman year, I decided to chop off all of my hair and get a very short pixie cut. I had always had long, brown hair that went down to my butt. In middle school, I would wake up two hours before I had to leave the house so that I could shower, blow dry, and curl my hair. After three years I was fed up with all the work that came with having this long, girlish hair so I decided that I wanted to cut it all off. When I asked my friends and family if they thought that a shorter haircut would look good on me they all told me the same thing, which was "short hair is for boys ". They questioned why I would voluntarily get rid of my beautiful, girly long hair and told me that I should want to make a good impression for my first day of high school. Everyone insisted that I wouldn't want to look back on my freshman yearbook and be filled with regret towards my boyish haircut. They also convinced me that if I started high school with short hair all my peers would think I was a lesbian. .
Despite all the negative comments I got, I decided I wanted to cut my hair regardless. I was tired of the same haircut and even though my parents told me it was cute after I got it cut, I could still tell they were hesitant about my hairstyle. My first day of freshman year came despite it and I became best friends with another girl who had a very similar haircut to mine. Just as my parents had predicted, everyone thought my best friend was actually my girlfriend until we both publically proved otherwise. Everyone around me policed me into thinking that the only way I could keep my femininity and continue to express myself as a girl was to keep my socially acceptable long hair. Even now, I find myself automatically making assumptions of girls with short hair, especially those who have short hair and don't dress in a stereotypically feminine way. Something I found myself doing a lot when I had short hair was dressing more feminine than I normally would to overly compensate for the masculine haircut I had.
