haircut

In secondary school, I wanted to look like the cool kids.

The boys liked to style their quiffs with wax.

But wax has never worked on my hair, or at least I thought it didn't.

It wasn't until I started getting £60 haircuts at Japanese hair salons that I realised that there is a way.

The secret, so I've learned, is to wet the hair to soften it, then to blow dry it into shape.

I think of the stereotypical manly father teaching his son to shave. I wonder if there are Asian dads out there teaching their sons how to blow dry their hair.

I had no one to teach me how to style or groom myself. I grew up with no sense of self, sartorially, physically nor psychologically.

Another thing I've had to struggle with as a young adult is making conversation and connecting with people. I never properly tried to make friends as an adult until I suddenly found myself single after my first relationship broke down.

I learned (probably off the internet) that it was good form to ask about the other person. So I took this strategy into my conversations but I still couldn't make the friends that I wanted. I thought I had the right tools and it sounded right to me, but actually taking them into play was a completely different experience.

Either I found myself 'interviewing' them, or I'd dive head first and realise that I wasn't actually interested in them.

That's the sting — finding that I wasn't actually interested in people. Now I realise that this is probably something that is transmitted passively in childhood. I guess you had to be around grown-ups who themselves modelled being interested in people. If your parents reached out to others, showed them warmth, then that's the kind of thing that seeps into your bones over time.

So to start from square one is quite terrifying. And the bitterness of having to spend so much effort doing this is real. Why do I have to work for it while other people have the luxury of auto-pilot? Why do I have to figure it out all by myself?