It’s February 2007, and Britney Spears walks into a salon, has her head shaved by her stylist, and attacks a paparazzi’s car when she comes out. She had been going through a huge transformation. She was only twenty-five years old, suffering from postpartum depression, and her ex-husband was threatening to take her kids away from her. 

Within a couple of years, she had become a wife, then a single mother to two children, her aunt Sandra had died from Ovarian cancer, and paparazzi would not leave poor Britney alone. They were constantly outside her home, following her everywhere, critiquing her parenting abilities, all while she was going through a divorce and custody dispute. But what was the biggest news? She shaved her head and “went crazy”.

We as a society love when women fail. We are all about support until someone is doing better than us, and then it’s a witch hunt. So when she shaved her head, it was the perfect proof for media outlets everywhere to label her as psychotic.

And despite everything we put her through, she gifts us her album “Blackout”. I urge you to listen and pay attention to the lyrics of her song “Piece of Me” from said album. It’s relevant to this discussion.

Flash forward to February 2026. With one Sunday-morning click, I was about to have everything I needed, thus the dangers of online shopping and same-day pickup. Two hours later, I was alone in my bathroom with low pigtails and a pair of scissors. Today, I would be shaving my head against everyone’s warnings.

Now, I’m no Britney Spears, but I had wanted to shave my head since high school or college. Every time I mentioned it to my mom or one of my sisters, they would emphatically say, “No, Abigail. Don’t even think about it.” But I thought about it. For nearly a decade, I thought about it.

Everyone in my family jokes that I’m impulsive, and I joke along with them. The truth is that I’m not impulsive at all. I thought through everything, and I knew shaving my head had to be done sooner rather than later, which is why I didn’t tell anyone until the damage was done.

It was a brutal couple of hours leading up to the chop that would lead to the buzz. I heard my paternal grandmother's voice in my head telling me that a woman’s job is to look attractive, to stay thin, and to marry rich. I’m summarizing years of her “life lessons”, but the point is that those words followed me into every mirror, sprang up on every bad hair day, and led to a life of hiding behind my hair. An ingrained inheritance that followed me into conversations and relationships I had no business having.

I have good hair. No really. It was thick and textured and grew so long and healthy. It was easy to hide behind. It was easy to position just right. I rarely put it in a ponytail throughout high school because it felt too exposing. I got over that in college, and my vanity shone through instead… the other side of my grandmother’s coin.

I was living proof of Judith Butler’s coined “performance of self”. Everything I did embodied what I had been taught. I was using my gestures, my tone, my appearance, my hair to communicate to everyone around me just how perfectly “woman” I was. At 19 years old, I hadn’t thought about why I was doing it, just that that’s how it was done. That’s how I behaved to get what I wanted. My grandmother was proud.

This vanity mindset I had developed was much more fun, and, oh, did I have fun. I had great friends, dated fun guys, went on last-second adventures, and my hair was just an accessory that made sure I looked good while doing it. The idea of shaving my head came up periodically throughout these years. I had girlfriends telling me to “do you boo” and boyfriends telling me “absolutely not”.

Women who shave their heads for no respectable or explainable reason have been pathologized, sexualized, and dehumanized in the media. Britney Spears had done something as simple as changing her hair because she was tired of people touching her, oogling her, and deciding whatever they wanted about her based on her appearance. She was mocked and made fun of by tabloids on every newsstand. Our society of front-line communicators capitalized on the most vulnerable time of her life for profit and laughed while they did it. Britney had gone off script.

Britney is by no means alone in this. Sinéad O'Connor shaved her head in the 80s to rebel directly against the music industry, choosing to over sexualize her to flip a profit. She was easy to blacklist after that. (Pro tip: look up her rendition of "Black Is the Colour"; it’s one of my faves!) Solange Knowles shaved her head in 2009 and even released a statement on how she wanted to be free from beauty and society standards placed on black women. And what did she get? You guessed it! Backlash.

Amber Rose shaved her head when she was rising into the industry, inspired by Sinéad O'Connor herself. Ever since, her bleached blonde buzz cut had been one of the main talking points surrounding her appearance. Doja Cat was criticized after she shaved her head in 2022, as “fans” told her she was “no longer fuckable” and needed to grow it back immediately. Even Millie Bobby Brown, who shaved her head for a role and was a literal child at the time, received hate for her look from literal adults. Because nothing says mature like bullying a pre-teen for her appearance.

What did all these women have in common? They went off script, and they did so in the public eye.

I, along with many other young girls and women, grew up seeing this hateful criticism of women splashed on every tabloid, headlined on every morning show. So when the guy I was dating told me he’d leave me for shaving my head, I didn’t blame him!

And then I got sick at twenty.

It was this hyperfeminine identity passed down from my grandmother that reared its head when the possibility of chemo and surgeries and years-long medications that could and would cause hair loss and bloating became a very real possibility. All the things a vain twenty-something girl does not want to hear.

At that time, I was more concerned about the medications making me gain weight and lose hair than I was about the illness they would be treating.

As you can see, my twenty-year-old self’s priorities were way out of whack.

But all I heard was my grandmother’s voice. And now my long-term college boyfriend’s voice. Society’s voice. All telling me that a woman who shaves her head is a mess, is totally crazy, and is less likeable. Those voices had melded into my own voice in the back of my head, saying that losing my hair was one of the worst things that could happen to me.

I had surgery and, yes, some rough medications, but they were temporary. I didn’t lose my hair completely, but it did thin out. I ended my relationship. I was living alone. I had an amazing group of friends and an okay career for a twenty-two-year-old. I was talking to a therapist about my grandmother and my illness, and I still got emotional every time I washed my hair in the shower. Every time, there seemed to be more and more strands of hair coming off my head than I thought had even been there in the first place!

I had lost myself. I had pushed who I was so far down that I hardly recognize her now.

Looking back now, I realize I hadn’t traveled outside the country since before I got sick, and I love travel. I hadn’t moved. I hadn’t taken any big chances (which is my way). I started getting nervous during plane turbulence. I started crying if I was driving on the highway and a storm hit. I got overly nervous doing normal things I never used to worry about. My stress levels were at an all-time high, and my play and creativity levels were at an all-time low.

Not sure how my personality survived all that, but thank God it did.

That initial experience of hair loss cracked something open in me that has been growing ever since. It turns out losing your hair doesn’t mean you have to lose yourself. Years went on, and my hair grew, but never fully returned to its former glory. I wore my hair up all the time because it’s more practical and I no longer cared how it looked to someone in passing. I would chop it short, grow it out, chop it again, but I never cut it as short as I had always wanted to.

But on February 1st, 2026, a full moon, mind you, I chopped it. And then I chopped it some more. I was having fun with it. I called my best friend, and she helped me shave the back and the edges. She was extremely excited for me, and her encouragement to do something I’d always wanted drowned out all the voices who had warned me against it. Sometimes all you need is one yes.

It’s been four months. My hair is thicker now (I looked up hella ways to care for scalp health, so I’m sort of an expert now). I’m healthier. I’m happier. My face is front and center, and now I am front and center.

Since shaving my head, I got laid off from the job that I hated but was too comfortable in. That may sound like a negative, but in retrospect, I promise you it was not (woohoo severance). I started working on some of the professional and academic projects I had been putting off. I started working freelance again. I cleaned out my entire house (yes, even the basement) and donated everything I didn’t want to bring with me on my next move. I visited family I hadn’t seen in forever and planned and scheduled a month-long trip that I had been dreaming about in passing for years. And, for the first time in a long time, I have not been having autoimmune flair-ups. Coincidence?

Okay, you might be thinking, “This sounds like it has way more to do with getting laid off than with shaving your head.” And damn, way to rain on my parade! Shaving my head was an important first step in rediscovering myself.

The post-layoff events are quite dramatic, but the hair transformation was not. I looked in the mirror every stage of the chop-chop-buzz, and I liked what I saw. I was proud of who I saw. In fact, after that point, I didn’t hear my grandmother’s voice at all.

With all that hair I cut off, I shed years of doors I had closed for myself. My head is lighter, my back is straighter, and I am more me than I’ve ever been.

I can’t imagine doing something like this in the public eye, but I hope that each of the women who were criticized for shaving their heads felt more themselves than ever when they looked in the mirror. I hope it freed a little part of themselves that was barricaded by camera flashes and magazine covers.

It’s just hair, but damn, look what it had been holding.