Fluff

I arrived back in Japan last night, with the blossoms just breaking out and a new part of the country and an air that is already fresher and sweeter than Tokyo, and that`s with advanced jetlag and a cold - but I`ve decided to write about my hair instead. Changing your country is all well and good, but nothing shakes a girl quite as much as changing her image.

There is a big difference between moving where you are, and moving who you are, and 10,000 miles is not quite enough - I decided when I got here and sniffed the air - to feel like I`ve started again. So, to help me feel like the fresh beginning is quite as fresh as it could be, I got the brown hair dye and the scissors out, and I now have short, auburn hair that laughs in the face of mousey roots and will probably get far less confused tugs from five year old Japanese children (one of my previous students collected one of my long blonde hairs from the carpet - when she thought I wasn`t looking - and put it proudly in her pencil case). Practically, and culturally, it should help me blend in and go relatively unnoticed (as long as I can find shoes that somehow reduce my height by a foot or two). Practically and culturally, it should save me a lot of time and effort, trying to find a Japanese hairdresser who doesn`t look at my blonde highlights and run into a backroom crying and searching for her college hair manuals.

It`s more than that, though. As I stood and stared at myself in the mirror this morning, feeling strangely bereft and asexual and a little like a large French pageboy from the 1400s, I realised that my fine, bleach blonde curls have always been part of my identity, and they`ve tied me to it. Without any exception, every boyfriend I have ever had has loved them; without exception, every boyfriend has called me (thinking themselves stonkingly original, obviously, as all men do) Fluffy, or Fluffs, or Baby, or Kitten. Round eyes and fat cheeks haven`t helped me in my attempt to be taken even remotely seriously, obviously, but I have lost count of the amount of men who have kissed the end of my nose and told me I`m cuuutte. Regardless of the fact that my IQ is often considerably higher than theirs, or that the pinnacle of their creative talent involves pointing a camera at something pretty and pressing a button, or that their idea of biting wit is to say "toodaloo" every single time you announce that you`ll be going to the toilet.

"Is Fluffy writing?" they would say, when I sat down with at my computer (except that the `r` would be missing, so it would be Is Fluffy witing?"). "Is my Fluff drawing a picture?" they would say when I went anywhere near a piece of paper (except that it would be dwawing - presumably, again - in case the r scared me and my fluffy little endeavours). And then they would ruffle my hair, stroke my nose and tell me how sweet I looked when I concentrated. And, when I finally lost my temper, they would remind me how incredibly enchanting and adorable I was when I told them to "seriously, go and f*ck themselves."

It`s a hair colour, and that`s all it is, but it changes more than the colour of my hair. When I`m blonde,  I get more attention and I get more compliments, but I also get cheated on repeatedly (with brunettes), patted on the head, walked all over, ignored and patronised. Without my wispy yellow curls, I go completely unnoticed (I`m not particularly attractive without them, basically: they are the curtains in front of the magician) but I also feel stronger, more creative, and more independent. The blonde me gets her heart broken and spends six months in a bedsit, crying. The blonde me cares whether boys think she`s pretty or not. The brunette me doesn`t. That little box of hair dye - the one that cuts the old Holly off at the root, the one that sticks a finger up at every boy who has ever told me they were `proud` of me for knowing the answer to a general knowledge question - doesn`t just dye my hair; it colours my opinion of myself, no matter how wrong and stereotyped that opinion is. And the scissors that have made me look like a boy have simultaneously cut off all the curly, fluffy bits of me that begged so badly to be looked after and protected and never really were.

I`m in a new part of Japan, and it`s a completely fresh start for me; a chance to stretch my limbs, and laugh again, and joke again, and swear again, and be somebody stronger, and less vulnerable. But it`s my hair colour, and not my location, that has made me feel like I can truly start again. Because it doesn`t matter that the change is nonsense and all in my head, and on my head, and around my head. It doesn`t matter that I`m living up to every stereotype that has ever been written. It just matters that there has been a change. And that the past - as well as every single person who has used my hair to press my abilities and passions into the far less scary shape of cuteness - has been finally, totally, permanently (it says so on the packet) removed, destroyed and cut off.

And it is staying that way.