The Root of the Human Condition

Why you want what you do not have

Does anyone ever have the hair they want? I feel confident I can answer this with a resounding no. It’s a little like wondering if anyone ever feels they have enough money. Whatever you have is always not quite what you think would make you happy. It’s the human condition, unrelated to the objective and actual facts of what you possess. We are programmed to feel like something else—longer, shorter, thicker, thinner, darker, lighter—would satisfy our souls.

I’m more acutely aware of this because I’m a redhead, and consequently I have a heightened awareness of all issues related to hair. Even the word “redhead” is a cue. Do we call people with blonde hair “blondeheads”? Being a redhead is viewed as a character totality more than a hair color—it defines the essence of your being. Red hair comes with personality features (stubborn, ungovernable); health conditions (resistance to anesthesia, intolerance to sun); plus singularity (almost always you are the one redhead in any crowd). Redheads have the prospect of extinction hanging overhead: We are the dodos of hair colors, marching into a bleak endpoint in eternity.

When I was young, I hated having red hair. It was so visible. My hair was electric, pulsing around my head like a bag full of snakes, a nimbus of coils and waves and ringlets. Once, when I was six or seven, my sister and our babysitter ratted my hair into a gigantic red halo, as big as a harvest moon. How did we tame it when the fun was over? I no longer remember, but I know it was quite a task and might have even required scissors. (I have a picture of this somewhere, with me looking like a little clown, and if I can dig it up I’ll share it with you and you’ll see I’m not exaggerating.)

As a young person, my dream was to have straight brown hair. I would have settled for just straight, or just brown; anything other than wild and wooly red. Now that I’m old and wise, I realize that the kids with straight brown hair were also, undoubtedly, unsatisfied and probably dreamed of having lighter hair, or darker hair, or hair with waves and curls or maybe—maybe—curly red hair. If any of us managed to get our wish regarding hair, there would be a lightning flash of happiness followed by the dull, predictable thud of human nature, yearning once again for a different head of hair.

When I was in my early teens, my mother agreed to let me straighten my hair. Perhaps a decade of untangling my kinks and whorls had worn her out. This was years before everyone had blow dryers and could smooth wild hair at home. The only way to make curly hair lanky at the time was with a chemical straightener. My mom’s permission came as a surprise. We weren’t the kind of kids who got nose jobs for our birthdays, or were allowed to use Sun-In to get streaks in the summer, or got mascara tutorials from my mom. She was very conservative in her beauty ministrations: She went to the hair salon for a wash-and-set every Saturday rain or shine, but she resisted any flourishes beyond that. (Once, I persuaded her to color her hair to cover her gray, and she hated the results so much that she started to cry.) Her willingness, then, to let me straighten my hair was out of character, for sure.

I went by myself to the salon, and I relished every nasty second of the treatment, including the acrid burn of the chemicals and the slight sizzling of my scalp. I had never seen my hair sleek, and I was astonished and entranced by it. I hardly recognized myself. I looked eons older, much more sophisticated—transformed, perhaps, into someone who could have been my aunt or adult cousin, who might have lived in a Manhattan townhouse and worked for a bank, rather than a giggly Midwestern suburban tween who liked horses more than boys, which is what I was. I walked home from the salon, and couldn’t stop stroking my hair, which was silky for the first time in my life. A truck driver rattling past whistled at me—another first. Was it my hair?

In time, the straightening treatment wore off, and I metamorphosed back into the me that used Scotch Tape to flatten my bangs and Campbell’s Soup cans as curlers and dashed for cover in a drizzle, knowing my hard work at taming my hair would be undone in the slightest moisture. The pitched battle between me and my wave pattern turned into a lifetime of strife. At least I eventually outgrew my antipathy towards my hair color, and came to appreciate it. Except for a few years when I dyed a chunk of hair green, I came to embrace my redheadedness with gusto.

The next decades of my life were devoted to Dyson: Dyson blow dryers, Dyson straightening irons, Dyson AirWrap devices. I tugged and twirled to smooth my hair. I threw in a Brazilian treatment now and then—a form of black magic that made my hair straighter and flatter than I actually wanted it—and assiduously avoided humidity, sudden cloudbursts, car washes.

And then one day, I was done. For a while, I had noticing just how many waking hours I spent drying my hair, fighting to settle it down and smooth it out, and in that moment, sensing mortality and the sweeping second hand of time, I said Fuck it. Life is shockingly short; was this how I want to spend it, yanking at my hair to make it straight? It had been so long since I’d let my hair dry on its own that I wasn’t even sure what it would look like. I washed, rinsed, towel-dried, and waited. My hair began to curl, like pea shoots. It wasn’t the mad mess of my childhood hair, but a sort of mature version, wiggly and wavy but not the full-moon tangle I remembered wrestling with as a kid. It was fine. I was fine.

For me, this change was billboard-level dramatic, and I assumed it would attract all sorts of commentary. The truth is most people spend a lot of time thinking about their own hair and very little time thinking about other people’s. A few friends mentioned that my hair looked nice. My husband didn’t seem to notice, but eventually made a comment about how much less time I was spending blow-drying my hair. In the greatest touch of irony, one friend studied me for an extra moment or two and then said, “Did you get a perm?”

SHOW NOTES

—Late to the party, for sure, but I am finally reading Wolf Hall. I should say, more correctly, that I’m listening to it, and it’s a great audiobook, although there are a few too many people named Thomas, so now and then I lose track of what’s going on. I started the book several times in the past and just never quite clicked with it, but this time, I’m all in.

—I just noticed that my favorite recent book, The Safekeep, is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, yay!

—I’m traveling, and again did this two-week trip with just a carry-on, which I’ve been bragging about to anyone who will listen. Why do I feel like this is such an accomplishment? Well, I do.

—One of the best things I’ve been taking on these trips has been this Tibi Lucas Bag which is the perfect size and incredibly versatile. It is big enough to hold a laptop or books but it doesn’t scream TOTE or, god forbid, DIAPER BAG; if you carry it at dinner with just a wallet and your glasses, it feels like a chic handbag. For daily use, I carry a smallish handbag, but when I’m traveling I often need to carry a little more when I’m out and about, and this has turned out to be perfect. Highly recommend.

—I know I’m often exclaiming joyfully about Tibi items, and obviously I’m a little obsessed with the brand. For what it’s worth: I know some of the folks at Tibi, but no one is giving me anything for free.

—I was chuckling when I packed for this recent trip and grabbed several reporter’s notebooks, realizing that I’ve been using the same exact ones for decades. I guess it’s the one constant in my life. My preferred: Portage Reporter's Notebook. It used to be hard to get these, so I would steal packs of them from the magazine’s supply closet. Fortunately, they’re now easier to buy than steal. Accept no substitute: These are IT.