People need to accept me for who I am

Going through my old papers, I stumbled upon, or should I say, tripped and went sprawling over my old voter ID card. The photo on it was taken in 1994 when I was 20 years old. It’s an awful photo, but even so, I look terrible. I’m about 20 kilos overweight and my hair comes down to, and slightly past, my shoulders. My expression is the grey, a listless one that comes with bad health and overall I wouldn’t have been surprised if, even in a democracy, I was banned from voting.

Some men look good in long hair, others look as if they need (in the words of my late, great uncle) two weeks of continuous hair cutting. In those hirsute days, my grandmother and mother would often plead with me to get a haircut, not because they disapproved of boys with long hair — they didn’t — but because I looked like a troll in a rat-eaten Cher wig. I also got a lot of startled looks on the street and in shops, lots of grins behind my back and much staring.

My reaction to all this was defiance. “This is me,” I would think. “I don’t care about what I look like, because it shouldn’t matter what I look like. People need to accept me for who I am, and I’m an interesting nonconformist which is why I wear my hair long.”

What I missed back then was that defiance has a built-in component of self-handicapping.

I knew I didn’t look good in long hair, but I kept it anyway. Why? Part of it was my reasoning that I could change it any time — two minutes at a barber and I’d come out looking at least half-human again. But a large part of it was that the hair became a crutch, an excuse. If someone didn’t like me, for example, I could always tell myself: “They aren’t cool enough to appreciate a guy with long hair”. The hair wasn’t so much a reflection of my independent spirit, but an effort to present myself as one or make myself one by adopting some of the visual language of those in the — forgive me — fringes. In short, I didn’t wear my hair with pride or conviction. I wore it defensively and this showed.

I know, I was 20 and was pretty harsh on myself. Everyone goes through a phase of invention and reinvention.

But it’s significant that my long hair coincided with being 20 kilos overweight — some of that social protest was definitely aimed inwards.

I think it’s safe to say that anyone who makes an aesthetic choice out of defiance, is making the wrong choice. Some people are genuinely quirky and can carry all kinds of extreme looks — from dreadlocks to all-body tattoos — because they do it naturally. Others make us uncomfortable to look at them, for we seem to instinctively pick out the ones who are hurting or hiding. The ones who need to say out loud, at least visually, that this is who they are. “Love me or hate me,” they seem to say both to you and themselves, “I change for no one”.

So what happened to the guy in the voter ID? I still remember the day I went to the barber and told him, “Short, boss”. College was over and I was entering the world of job interviews and work. As those long locks fell away from my head, I pretended to regret, but actually felt relieved. I was an actor in a green room taking off his scratchy costume before stepping back out onto stage. Who will he be this time?

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.