The Lexicon of My Hair From Where I Sit — Essay

My hair has been part of my lexicon my entire life.

It arrived before I had words for it. By the time I was two years old, I had a full head of thick, coarse, curly hair — the kind that has opinions. The kind that doesn't ask permission. My mother had thin, straight hair. She loved me completely. But my hair was a foreign language she had never been asked to speak.

So in third grade, she did what made sense to her. She took me to a stylist and had it cut into a Vidal Sassoon pixie. Neat. Controlled. Manageable. For the time in my young life, my hair behaved.

Or at least it looked like it did.

I should tell you: I was adopted. My parents chose me — wanted me, loved me — and I have no doubt they were fully committed. But a baby is still largely a mystery at arrival. I was simply the unknown of a baby on steroids. They were learning too.

My hair was the first visible evidence that I was uniquely, undeniably me. Before I had language for identity, I had a curl pattern.

I should also mention: I am nearly six feet tall.

I say that not for effect, but because it matters to the story. My hair was never operating in isolation. It was arriving on top of a person who was already impossible to miss. I stood out before I said a word, before I did a thing, before my hair had any opinion at all.

And yet — I grew up in a family of introverts. Quiet people. People who moved through the world without needing to be noticed. I came out of the gate as an extreme extrovert, which meant I was both wired to engage every room and vaguely aware that standing out made the people I loved uncomfortable.

I am still, honestly, learning that it's okay.

In high school, I sat next to a boy named Mark Dolan in Science class. He used to give me a hard time — not cruelly, just with the particular confidence of a teenage boy — that my hair never looked the same two days in a row. He wasn't wrong. It didn't. It changed with the weather, with the humidity, with whatever mood it was apparently in that morning. It was unpredictable in the way that things with real personalities tend to be.

I didn't know then that "unpredictable" could be a gift.

What I did know — with absolute certainty — was that I wanted people to like me. An embarrassing amount, honestly, for someone who is nearly six feet tall and impossible to miss. You'd think the sheer square footage would come with built-in confidence. It does not work that way.

What I've learned, slowly and somewhat stubbornly, is that the people who earn real respect aren't always the ones who were trying to be liked. They were busy being useful. Being honest. Showing up as exactly who they were, whether or not that fit the room.

The hair, it turns out, was always ahead of me on this one.

Because here's what I didn't say out loud for a very long time: I was a square peg for most of my life. The tall girl at Catholic school who came home in tears more days than I'd like to remember. The extrovert in the quiet family. The adopted child who didn't look like anyone in the room. I got very good at making it look like I was fine. At making the standing out seem like a choice rather than a condition.

What I didn't understand then — what takes most of us the better part of a lifetime to understand — is that the not-fitting-in wasn't the problem to be solved. It was the path. Every room that didn't quite fit was teaching me something about which room eventually would. Every piece of myself I tried to manage or minimize was simply waiting to become exactly what someone else needed to see.

I was becoming whole. I just didn't have a word for it yet.

For years, I negotiated with my hair the way you negotiate with something you don't fully understand but can't ignore. I worked around it. I managed it. I did what I could.

Then, about twenty-five years ago, someone handed me a round brush and changed my life.

I know how that sounds. But I mean it.

A stylist who actually understood my hair gave me my first real blowout. And something clicked — not just the style, but the feeling. My hair, smoothed and shaped, still mine but finally fluent. It wasn't taming. It was translation. Someone had finally learned to speak my language.

I've been a blowout devotee ever since. Dry Bar before events. A ritual, really.

Though I'll tell you something interesting: my hair has a second life in Palm Springs, where we have a home. The dry desert air does something to my curls that Minnesota never has. I can air dry there. I can spritz with water and watch them spring back to life. In Minnesota, that same spritz would be chaos. Same hair. Different environment. Completely different result.

I think about that more than I probably should.

When I turned fifty, I decided I wanted to let my hair go grey.

My three daughters had thoughts about this.

They worried it would age me. Make me look old before my time. And I — who had spent a lifetime learning to be exactly who I was — waited. I was fifty years old and I waited another decade for permission I never needed to ask for in the first place.

At sixty, I stopped waiting. In January of 2020, I let the color go.

A few months later, Covid arrived, salons closed, and suddenly going grey was everywhere. A cultural moment. A trend. Women all over the country were letting their roots grow out and calling it liberation.

I was already there.

My grey came in silver — really silver, with depth. Light in the front, salt and pepper underneath. The thickness that had confounded everyone around me since I was two years old turned out to be exactly what gives it dimension. The very thing that seemed unmanageable all those years was what made it beautiful.

Going grey felt like one word: liberating.

Recently, I was asked to introduce a group of community impact honorees at the fifth annual Taste of the Twin Cities — an event that brings together business and nonprofit leaders, with all proceeds going toward food scarcity. Rena Sargianopolous — a familiar and trusted face in the Twin Cities — was serving as MC. She had my introduction in hand. She started reading it.

And then she stopped.

Mid-introduction. In front of the room. To say: "Can we also talk about her hair? She has the most fabulous hair."

I walked to the stage and said, "Thank you Rena. And my hair thanks you too."

The room laughed. I laughed. And somewhere underneath that moment was a little girl with a pixie cut who would not have believed any of it.

Here is what I know now, from where I sit:

My hair has been doing this my entire life — announcing me before I arrive, refusing to be ignored, never looking the same two days in a row. For years I thought that was the problem.

Turns out it was just the preview.

I spent years wondering where my relevance lived. What my voice added. Whether the most distinctive parts of me were assets or inconveniences. The curl pattern no one knew what to do with. The grey that came in a decade late but arrived exactly on time. The woman who is nearly six feet tall and still, occasionally, has to remind herself it's okay to be seen.

My hair knew before I did.

And here's the lesson: the things about us that seem unmanageable are usually just waiting for the right room.

My hair has been part of my lexicon my entire life.

I'm just finally fluent.

— Katie