That Time I Went to the Salon to Get Rid of My Hair
By: Lara Da Rocha
Tags: Hair, Nonfiction, Cancer, Relationships, Women

Ronald Hair’s bright white walls, sleek black stone floor, and square-shaped furniture reminded me of an IKEA showroom. When I arrived, there was only one other customer, reading a magazine in the waiting area. A dog was sleeping peacefully in the corner, with the long golden hair fitting of a hair salon mascot.

I felt good about my decision to cut my hair. Still, I’d brought my partner Matthias along for support in case I decided to chicken out at the last minute.

A young woman named Sara told me she would be my hairdresser for the day.

“This is what I want,” I told her, pointing to a photo on my phone of Charlize Theron’s shaved head in Mad Max: Fury Road — she was soooo cool, I wanted to look just like her.

Sara brushed and stroked my long, dark, straight hair. A hair just like hers.

“Quite a drastic change,” she said, her tone fishing for answers.

“I’ll start losing my hair in three weeks from the chemo,” I told her. “So I’m doing this to get used to the idea.”

I was trying to be casual, but Sara stopped her hands in mid-air and looked back at me in the mirror.

“How old are you?”

“33.”

Her eyes dropped. She gulped and then whispered, “That’s my age.”

Her hands still frozen, she asked the usual follow-up questions I get when people find out I have cancer: “What type of cancer?” and, “But did you smoke?” and, “What’s the prognosis?”

I answered calmly and smiling: “Lung,” “No,” and “No cure.” I had the feeling I was this young hairdresser’s first cancer patient. It wasn’t the first time someone put me in this situation. As Cancer Patient Representative, on my shoulders lay the responsibility of educating Sara in the name of my kind. I was showing her that most people with cancer are not these fragile, hollow, half-dead zombies you see on TV. Sometimes, we even look like you, and that’s the most confronting.

“Would you like to sit over there?” she asked. “It’s more private.”

She pointed at the area in the back usually reserved for children, with toy car-shaped seats and small screens showing cartoons under the mirrors.

“No, that’s OK,” I smiled. “I’m really fine with this.”

“Would you like your friend to sit with you?”

She gestured to Matthias, sitting ten meters away on the waiting area couch. He was intently flipping through hairstyling magazines, even though he’d been bald for the last decade.

“Sure,” I said. I had a feeling she was asking not so much for me but for her to have someone else to interact with.

She walked up to him and whispered, “She, uh, she would like you to join her.”

Matthias later told me that he immediately realized by her demeanor that I’d dropped the cancer bomb on her. For the last year and a half since my diagnosis, he’d experienced plenty of awkward situations of this nature, so he was used to it.

Sara finally started cutting away, in silence now, which, to be honest, is my preferred way to interact with a hairdresser.

The tufts of hair fell all around me on the shiny black floor. Sara’s eyes were watery. I kept waiting for my tears to start rolling, but instead, I felt excited to see what I’d look like.

In a few minutes, the hair that had taken years to grow was now mostly gone. I looked at myself in the mirror with this unevenly cut punk-rock hair, bangs still intact. It was the first time I saw myself as a short-hair adult woman. I looked at Matthias through the mirror.

“I look so good!” I said.

I was smiling, and even though I couldn’t see Matthias’s mouth over the face mask, his eyes were tiny slits.

“You do.”

I was stunned by the discovery. Never in a million years had I thought I’d like to see myself with short hair. I’d wasted all these years stuck to the same boring hair when this felt so much more me.

Then came the clipper.

“How long is my hair going to be?” I asked Sara.

“12mm,” she said. “It’s a bit longer than what you showed in the photo, but with drastic changes, I prefer to be on the safe side.”

When she finished, she held up a round mirror and swiveled the chair so I could see every angle of my new look.

“I love it,” I said, smiling. For a second, I wondered if she could have handled any other reaction.

I watched my dead hair on the floor be swept away into the trash can.

As I walked to the cash register and took my wallet out, Sara approached me.

“You don’t need to pay anything,” she said. “We can’t make money off of something like this.”

“Do you mean off of helping people with cancer?” I joked. She was looking at the floor and didn’t laugh.

It felt weird to get special treatment because of my cancer, but I knew it was important to her. This was The Netherlands, and Dutch people are notoriously cheap, so giving something away for free meant a lot. I smiled and thanked her.

As I stepped out of Ronal Hair, I felt lighter, literally and metaphorically speaking. I’d been on this emotional journey with Sara, the hairdresser, and I’d come out on the other side a whole new person, but in a way more myself. I wasn’t a slave to this hair anymore, to this idea of what I should look like.