How I Got This Way

Or

Why I Want Dreads Part 1

The story of why I want dreads begins in February 2001.  It was the first time I saw someone wearing dreadlocks, and I think that first impression has colored the rest of my experience with them.  (Which means, unfortunately, that if your first impression of them was awful, you will probably hate mine by default.  Sigh.  Nothing I can do there.)  I was a freshman in high school, fourteen years old, and at a debate tournament. I was doing a duo interp of a scene from Jane Eyre with a friend of mine.  At the age of 14, I nearly believed that I was Jane Eyre.  The plain Quakeress, firm and quiet and resolute, was my hero.  At the tournament, all of the contestants were dressed up: ties, skirts, suits, shined shoes, and best behavior.  A decade later and as a teacher, I think we probably looked adorable, a lot like when little kids wear tuxedos for weddings, but at the time we all felt very grown up and professional.

Except for my hoodie (I had already changed out of my suit),
this is what we looked like at debate tournaments.

As Jack and I went to our second or third round of the day, one of the teams of actors we were up against (interp is primarily an acting event) caught my eye.  Well, one of the contestants caught my eye, and not just because he was cute.  He was neatly dressed in a suit and had the careful posture we all were sporting that day, but he also had dreads.  They weren't long and dramatic; they were short, ear length or shorter.  What drew me to them is the way they paired with the suit to form a unique balance of professional and personality.  I got the same impression from those dreads that I got when watching one year's Miss America contest when I was probably seven.  We were sort of watching it by accident, having found it while flipping through the four channels we had to see what was on.  My sisters, mother, and I watched as all of the contestants strolled out on the stage like princesses in their evening gowns.  There were lots of pastel colors (early 90s) and bare shoulders and low necklines and big blond hairdos.  Then came one contestant who walked onto the stage with a big, genuine smile, brown hair in a sleek up-do, and a bright, neon green dress with sleeves.  My mom and both of my older sisters took one look at her and said, with obvious respect, "That girl's got spunk."  Looking from my older sisters and my mother to the screen, the little girl that I was, who had never read Jane Eyre, immediately wanted to have "spunk," too.

I got the same feeling when I visited Arizona last year and saw Saguaro cactus growing out of a rock in the desert.  "Wow, that's spunk," and then, "I want to be that tough and determined." I looked at that kid's hair and instantly fell in love with it.  At the time of that debate tournament I had no idea what dreads were.  I just knew that the boy's unusual but somehow fitting hairstyle had that mysterious spunk that I was always on the watch for.  Later, when I asked Jack what you called that hair style, he laughed at me and told me that I had just seen dreads for the first time.

It may surprise those who haven't known me since I was a preteen, but I didn't have much obvious spunk.  I was extremely conservative in person and dress.  The me I am now was in there, my friends can tell you I was just as random and weird then as I am now, but it was buried in there pretty deep.  It took me until my junior or senior year to feel comfortable wearing a hoodie to school; I thought they were sloppy and too casual.  When I was a freshman in college I saw a girl wearing  tie for a belt.  I thought that was awesome and bought a second hand tie to wear as a belt myself.  It sat in my closet for months waiting for me to get up the guts to tie it on and walk out the door.  It took me until I was 20 years old to have the chutzpah to get the perm I had wanted to try for years.  Before the perm, the most daring thing I'd ever done with my hair was to get bangs and cut it to shoulder length with layers.  There's a reason that, when I started wearing skulls and crossbones, the first bit of pirate-themed stuff I bought was underwear.  It wasn't to be sexy; it was because no one would see it.  I was way into pirates, but didn't have the guts to wear it on the outside.

The perm that made me feel like a rebel.

As the years passed, I started to get the hang of who I was and who I wanted to be and how to let all the parts of my personality show, the Quakeress and the hippie and the punk and the 5-year-old-little girl.  It helped to have friends just as quirky and unique who never seemed to be afraid to wear or say whatever their whims prompted to them.  Friends like Di, Anna, Lina, Amanda, and many others gave me examples of people who could wear whatever they wanted and have nobody care, because their personalities were more charismatic and eye-catching than the pixie cut, the crazy clothes, the shaved head, or the pink Mohawk could ever hope to be.  Gradually, I experimented on my own.  I wore huge skulls plastered on my back, I wore gypsy skirts to church, I wore feather necklaces, I wore knee high argyle socks under my dress pants.  I cut my hair into the pixie cut I'd been coveting since I was 12, and then I dyed it red, black, blonde, copper red, purple, and back to brown in a year's time.    When my puzzled mother asked if I was going through an identity crisis, I honestly said that it felt more like I finally gotten so comfortable with who I was that I could wear whatever the heck I dreamed up and it wouldn't change who I was.

So.  That brings us up to the present day.  All of that long back story is to tell you that after a journey that long, I am triumphantly making things happen now.  I am systematically going through the the wishes and whims and crazy ideas I've always harbored but lacked the guts to implement.  If a wish isn't harmful or wrong in some way, I'm making it happen.  I'm actively going after the things I want, and having dreads is on the list.  After taking that many years to get to this point of confidence, I am very attached to doing these things I always believed myself to be incapable of doing.

"So why dreads?" you may be asking.  What is it about them that captured your imagination so permanently?  Well, the answers to that are many and they range from the shallow and superficial to the personal and unpost-on-my-bloggable.  Which means you'll probably end up with an overdose of the shallow reasons and conclude that I, and my dreads, are rather pathetic and shallow.  Who knows, maybe you're right.   But, looking at the length of this post, you'll have to be right another day.  I'll talk about dreads specifically in an up and coming post within the week, promise no crossies.