The clippers in my hands were from the Pharmaprix on Saint Laurent Boulevard in Montreal. They cost me CAD$49.99 excluding tax, slightly defeating the economical purpose of the haircut.

I was sitting on the balcony next to our overflowing recycling bins. An assortment of fruit flies, gnats and ants threatened to crawl on my feet.

I was running my hands through my hair repeatedly, pre-empting its self-inflicted disappearance while also marvelling at the kitchen-scissors-blunt-chop I’d given myself the day before.

Greta was perched next to me on the spiral stairs, while Maggie and their partner Finn whooped through the window. I turned the clippers on.

We set up Greta’s phone to film the shave, resting against a circle mirror wobbling on its stand. I wanted to be able to look back at the thing I had been so scared to do for six years.

Planning my first strike, I was babbling about “shaving against the grain”, granting a reply, “I don’t think hair has grain.” I vehemently disagreed: my hairdresser told me so, as did countless YouTube videos I watched in preparation.

Then, with a squeak and no hesitation, I ran the clippers along the right side of my head. Looking in the mirror, I clapped my hand over my mouth.

“Oh my god that is so short!” The guard of the clippers were not on properly and a number one level streak had been shorn down the side of my head.

For the next two months, until I shaved my head again, that uneven chunk of hair grew 2mm behind the rest.

I walked to Jeanne-Mance Park alone, predicting I would have some kind of meltdown after the combination of the clipper mishap and erasing a key element of how society valued my femininity.

I bought a beer from a convenience store and didn’t drink it.

The footpath reflected the sky – streaky orange tears. It looked like it was going to rain again.

I only cried a little.

* * *

I am five, and I beg my mum for a pixie cut like hers. She is a beautiful fairy. So all my hair goes and I am free from the sweaty blonde curls on my neck.

I am light; I run as fast as my little legs will let me. I swallow the Earth whole with my tiny power.

I am wearing a purple tie-dyed skirt at the Royal Melbourne Show. Mum buys me an ice cream and the woman serving us thinks I’m a boy.

I cry to Mum, “I never, ever want my hair this short again.”

* * *

In the lead up to shaving my head, it was all I could talk about.

Maggie and I were sitting at the kitchen table with our journals, when they said patiently, “You’ve now talked about this for an hour. I think you need to just shave your head.”

Greta had said the same thing, and we eventually went to the Pharmaprix to buy clippers. It was the last pair in stock.

I was trying to figure out why I felt that shaving my head would be the way I could come back into myself.

As a teenager, I was painfully obvious about my crushes on boys. I was feminine in a way I didn’t always love, a way that made my skin a little itchy.

I wore heels, my nails were rarely short, and I pushed down any inkling that I probably (definitely) liked girls. I was excellent at playing the role of Straight Girl.

Looking at photos of my teenage self, I can see a girl who has carefully sewn a version of herself together, and she’s holding her breath.

I often look through photo albums and Google Drives to find photos where I can see the queer kid in me. It’s between the ages of 4 and 10 where I can see them.

There’s a photo of me at Golden Plains Festival in 2010. I’m wearing cargo shorts, a T-shirt splashed with butterflies, and socks with giant peace signs pulled up to my calves. I have a Dance Academy cap on, slightly wonky.

It’s quite camp. She looks like herself, like me. She doesn’t look like she’s worried about how disastrous it would be to end up with a man.

Photograph courtesy of the author, 2010.

A few months before the Montreal trip, I went on my first queer date. It was not quite what I envisioned, as it was actually not a date.

I was convinced it was a date after some under-the-table leg touching. They, however, thought we were having an overdue platonic catch-up. They also thought I was straight (in their defence, I’d told them I was in the years prior).

I was flummoxed by their perception of me. I’d never looked gayer, I hadn’t been on a date with a man in months, and surely this was a date because they had asked me out for drinks.

It was before we both were on the same this-is-not-a-date page, I was warmed by beer and comfortable conversation, when they asked me, “What do you think of your gender?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know.”

They were the first person to ask me that question. 

Twenty minutes after I’d swept the balcony in Montreal of blonde hair remnants, there was a tornado.

Take shelter texts lit up our phone screens. From the top of the spiral stairs, we watched a deep blue roll in. Bits of hair I had missed in my cleaning lifted and fell, caught in a dance with twigs and rubbish.

Storms had been a constant of that summer. One night before the head shave, Greta, Maggie, Finn and I were having dinner at the table in the communal apartment garden. Dark clouds loomed, and mosquitoes were whining as we ate Maggie’s rice noodle salad. 

“I think I’d like it if you used ‘they’ pronouns when talking about me sometimes,” I offer in the silence of full mouths. I look at Maggie first.

They beamed back at me, while making a love heart with their hands, “Of course.”

Greta and Finn echoed Maggie. I was suspended in a warm pocket of air.

“The other day, when you said ‘they’ while referring to me,” I said, turning to Greta, “it just made me feel really good.”

* * *

One of my favourite books I’ve read this year is one Greta gave to me, Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles.

At one point, Eilieen writes about the men who were there before they began dating women: “I’d succumbed to the sensation of being Paul’s girl.”

At age 15 or 16, I made a deal with myself: I would let myself shave my head when I got a boyfriend. A bit of a catch-22, as neither of those things really happened when I was a teenager.

The rationale of my adolescent promise is crystal clear to me: I could only express myself – and potentially acknowledge something I knew about my sexuality – when I had the comfort and safety of a boyfriend to hide behind.

This imaginary boyfriend would be a shield from any assumptions about my being a raging lesbian with a shaved head because, duh, I had a boyfriend. Flawed, I know – and utterly skimming over the fact that straight women shave their heads, too.

The deal I made with my teenage self is bittersweet and kind of comforting.

That gay girl was right there; I can see them without the photos. I think I knew deep down that if I shaved my head, it would be curtain call for the Straight Girl.

I had an inkling that once I was physically representing a different version of myself, there would be nowhere to hide. The prospect of meeting this new version of myself, and of letting everyone else see her, was too scary for 16-year-old me.

“Succumbing” to being some guy’s girl was simply easier.

If I could, I would sit teenage me down with a cup of tea and a blanket, hug her and tell her: You will feel so light when you don’t let yourself get swept up in being chosen by a man. Your insides will float. You may not even be a girl in ways you fully understand; maybe your gender is something you don’t know.

I do know that one day you will feel utterly yourself, shaving your head just before a tornado in Montreal. The storm outside will be stirring up crap and chaos, not your insides.

“I think teenage us would be proud of where we are now,” my dear friend from high school Lulu said to me recently.

We were driving home from Red Hill, Mornington Peninsula, in the milky twilight. We were playing the Mamma Mia soundtrack – something we listened to on repeat in Year 11.

“Those girls would be so excited to see how it all turned out.”

A couple of months after coming home from Montreal, my head was shaved a second time by someone at Hairhouse Warehouse in St Kilda, Melbourne. It cost AUD$20 including tax.

I met her a week later.

“You’re boyfriend,” she said to me, lying on the couch. She is so beautiful, I thought to myself.

She observed that my heart was beating fast as she lay on my chest. Her hands were tracing my head. I felt very boyfriend.

Her fingers would comb through my hair as it grew, was shaved and grew again, as I learnt what it really meant to be utterly safe within myself. 

These days, I have a pixie cut. It’s not dissimilar from the one I had when I was five.