This past week, I got a haircut. I know what you are thinking; “Mil, who cares? It is a haircut.” But it is not just any haircut, it is the haircut.
Here, let me spell it out for you. In your mind, picture a tiny Mil Burns, fresh out of a hard day of third grade. I am watching TV, and a movie comes on. It is Freaky Friday (2003) hit film starring none other than Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, what I thought was going to be a standard watching experience. And then, 3 minutes and 14 seconds into the movie, it happens.
Or rather, he happens. Chad Michael Murray. His choker necklace, his shaggy hair that was somehow always greasy in just the right way and perfectly unkept, his big cargo pants and faded shirt that looked like they were directly from a hamper full of dirty laundry. He was amazing, like nothing I had ever seen before.
A picture of what I think is the perfect example of nonchalant masculinity.
At the time, I chalked it up to an itty-bitty crush on a teen heartthrob, but these days it’s becoming much clearer to me what my ob- session with Mr. Michael Murray truly was: gender envy. I wanted to be him, switch bodies, have my own ‘Freaky Friday’, if you will. And, this past week, this life- long need was fully realized with a fantastic haircut completed in my front yard by my good friend Maddie.
When I first saw myself after the haircut, I felt a distantly familiar warmth in my chest. I recognized it immediately: it was the same feeling that overcame me on that very day that I saw Chad Michael on my living room TV years ago.
Except rather than some boy on a screen, it was my own face staring back at me. It felt like I finally recog- nized myself. To some, this may seem like a hyperbolic retelling of something in- credibly mundane.
But here is the thing: our whole lives, who we should be and the ways we should want to see ourselves have
been dictated to us by an oppressively heteronormative society that has created two characters of what a “woman” should be and what a “man” should be. Our hair, our clothes, our demeanors, every ounce of our physical existence can feel so predetermined.
These predeterminations can be suffocating for those who exist outside of this strict binary. Therefore gender expression and euphoria can arise from something as seemingly small as a hair- style, or a pair of shoes, or a skirt, or a nickname, or whatever you feel makes you, you.
When the expectations are so constricting, existing exactly how you want to be can feel revolutionary.
So, yes, my haircut is just a haircut, but it represents something a lot less tangible, a single step in a life- long metamorphosis into the person I have always been meant to be.
Not to mention, it makes me look really handsome in a Chad-Michael-Murray kind of way.