for the girls with adam's apples, bald heads, and hair everywhere else

PROCESSING THE PROCESS 003

a self portrait taken sometime in june of 2020

i was about 9 or 10 years old when i had all my hair shaved off in the black-and-white tiled bathroom of my childhood apartment. it was…

🌀 the summer before 5th grade.

the summer all the perms since i was four years old caught up to my kinky coils, and left scabs on my scalp. it got so bad that the nape of my head, my kitchen, was thoroughly cooked. so much so, i had a reverse mullet going on. yeahhh… it wasn’t cute. i wish i had pictures but… i’m sure you can imagine: reverse mullet, permed hair, thin ends, and a headband thrown on top of a side part trying to hold everything (that’d already fallen apart) together.

that summer was really hard for me. i dreaded family outings and avoided going outside for fear of running into schoolmates who’d make fun of me. i was thoroughly embarrassed by this new cut. why did it have to be so shorttt? and it wasn’t a stylish cut either, no fun lines or fades —just bzzzt.

i hated how i looked, and was grieving my gender-binaried-informed ideas of what it meant to be a girl. no amount of pink/majenta/purples/sparkles could help my quickly plummeting (and already low) self-esteem. it didn’t help that my father would say things like “where are your earrings?” before we left the house to go anywhere. he really hated seeing me without earrings, and that only confirmed my worst fear at the time: that i did, in fact, “look like a boy”.

🌀 fast forward to 2018.

i’m in college and the most beautiful girl i’ve ever seen in my life is checking out the info booth next to me at the University Club Fair. she was bald, bad, and had swag. did i mention she was bald?! for cinematic flair, i’ll say my jaw dropped, but i think we all know that’s not the way sapphic cinema goes.

a year later, i slid into her dms and asked where she went in the city to get her hair cut¹. i was struggling to find any beauty supply stores, let alone Black barbers, near our university. of course, the barber she sent me was an hour and 10 minutes away. Trini man who’d been cutting hair since he was a teen, and asked me no less than five times if i was “sure about this decision” before letting the blades row across the lawn of my naps.

when he finished, i couldn’t. stop. smilinggggg.

before + after my first cut, i literally changed my IG username to @legallybwald after this cut —that's how sexy i was feeling

this, was a CUT !!!!!! and, everyone agreed:

SO happy i took these screenshots because the love was SO real 🥹 #archivalbaddieinnit

i left that barbershop understanding why men act the way they do after a fresh shapeup.

speaking of men, oddly enough i got cat-called more leaving the barbershop than on my way to the barbershop.

🌀funny… how fickle gender “norms” are.
not funny haha, funny fooken weird.

the trauma of having all my hair cut off when i was a child was still in my body. i went to the barbershop with a beat face (or the best way i knew how to beat my face back then which always looked pretty natural lol), and for a few months after, contended with my femininity in this way —not liking how i looked with short hair unless i had make-up on— until one day, the script stopped making sense. i started asking myself: what is this chokehold femininity has over me? in fact, what good has trying to be feminine —in the traditional, cis-hetero-white-supremacist-patriarchy-way— done me?

i made a video for my video art class about it. my professor (a white man) said he appreciated it but didn’t think i needed to “get all political” towards the end. lol. is all i have to say to that. el oh el.

(if i find it, i’ll come back and insert it here for y’all :)

once i stopped worrying about being feminine in the traditional sense,

🌬️enter the blonde baldie era:

one of my favorite eras.

i was eclectic, daring, desiring so much love, yet so deeply fearing commitment/being needed/tied down.

and yettttt, this traditional femininity beast wouldn’t release me from her clutches so, i spent 2020 - 2021 (this same platinum blonde baldie era) getting laser hair removal. money i surely didn’t have, but put on my credit card. ohhh the ways i’ve j’ai suffre-ed !!!

🌬️ the not-so-trendy-trend here…

why are all my femininity issues hair-related, you might ask? well, dear reader, i was simply born a hairy ass bitch, but i live in a world with such rigid gender rules that if i want to be seen as beautiful and desirable, i need to NOT be Black, NOT dark skin, and certainly NOT hairy.

okay, i’ll be honest. as much as i was bullied for being dark skin growing up, i was never bullied for being ugly. soooo, i guess there’s that? i get some privilege brownies for being unconventionally conventionally attractive? also, because of the amount of dark skin jokes i had slurred at me growing up, insults rarely have an effect on me now. in fact, i have to laugh. if you’ve never had a fellow darkskin (maybe 1 shade lighter than you in the winter) classmate in 4th grade tell you, “you’re blacker than my church shoes”??? you haven’t experienced bullyinggg. lmaoo this is not the bullying olympics but i have to laugh about the trauma at this point; i have a visceral memory of that roast to this day. when i tell you, i got so mad, i took his chocolate milk and dumped it on his head —Junie B. Jones style. and yes was sent straight to the principal’s office even though he started it with the disrespect; but i ruined his uniform, whateverrr.

idk, it’s all a lot i’m processing, today. i’m thinking about all this: rules around femininity, the choice to cut hair off where people think you should have a lot of it and the pressure to upkeep hairlessness where you’ve been taught you shouldn’t have it because that’s a “male thing”… IT’S ALL TOO FOOKEN MUCH BRUV!!!

but yeah, i’m thinking about all this today because i had an interaction with a lady i was meeting up with to give some art supplies i no longer wanted/needed². and to make this recap brief (because i’m feeling tense in my chest while writing about this), she told me she’s looking forward to 47th getting things back to normal, back in order. i asked her, in a moment of dizzying shock but also overwhelming curiosity, what she felt was out of line that 47th was going to help bring “order” to.

in a slew of stories she tells me:

“some things are wrong and some things are right. it is black and white.”

“i used to live in the west village and now, it’s not as bad as it used to be, but when i tell you, back in the day it was Sodom & Gomorrah down there.”

“on my way here, there was this man on the train, across from me, wearing a dress, trying his very best to look like a woman.”

“and there’s that man who’s been locked up because he had a rightful reaction to the person he married not telling him she was a transexual (this is the word she used) before they got married. why would you not disclose that kind of information? and now that man is locked up for reacting how he did to having been deceived.”

like something out of a God of Nature³ movie, both of our trains arrived on the platform at the same time. i said,

“might this be your train? mine just came, too.”

she said, leaning in for a hug: “thank you so much again!”

and we went our opposite ways.

you know, the great thing about being an avid mask-wearer is that i’m protected from both covid-19 and whatever other b.s. (virus and otherwise) might be in the air. in short, i’m sure the lady couldn’t read my expression well because she could only see my eyes. and i have perpetually bright eyes, so, not much info you can glean there.

as i write this i am feeling 2 distinct (and many) things:

1. gross, scared, disheartened, sad. so very, very sad. i’m holding back tears writing this because that lady, who is a Black woman and mother of 5, doesn’t know how much harm there is in her words. how much fuel she’s adding to the hellfire that is already suffocating many of us.

2. grateful for the “enemy”⁴ that reveals themself to me. i’ve always said, the silent majority (as we might want to call them) is not really silent. liberals and leftists are just not good listeners. like sorry to tell the truth, but actually not sorry. how did we get here? people don’t talk to their neighbors. don’t step outside of their silly silos and reverberating echo chambers long enough to be discomforted by a different (albeit nervous-system-shocking) world view. not to say this like it’s easy cuz it’s not. i’m having a really hard time processing this. and this is not to blame individuals for what is the intentional doing of centuries of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy⁵. this is an honest call-in to the ways we can maybe be doing more interpersonally to protect those most vulnerable (and unjustifiably hated) amongst us.

this tiktok still stands:

"the tea is that jesus wouldn't even like you"

ooh, and this one too. can’t download cuz i don’t have tiktok, but any religious person that might be offended by anything i say in this reflection, should DEFINITELY watch this first.

꩜ an ode to girls with adam’s apples

even the name of this bump on the front of the throat that protects the voice box (laryngeal prominence), has always had me raising my eyebrows. the lore is rooted in misogyny. yes i know the biblical parable where Eve was deceived into eating from the Tree of Life by the snake (devil), shared it with Adam, then they both gained knowledge of all that is good and evil, which made God mad so he banished them from of the Garden of Eden. Old Testament God really gives deadbeat dad energy. sorry to say. like why put a tree like this in Paradise in the first place; and then to have such a punitive response when they fail what seems to be a test of their ability to listen to God? whyyy? these are the questions i’d be asking in my Catechism classes as a child and no one had answers. would just tell me: “you have free will” and “God doesn’t treat his children like robots”, “we are all born with original sin and that’s why we must be baptized so we can enter the gates of heaven”. okay, sister Maria, you can have that.

the term “Adam’s apple” is still misogynistic because
(1) it implies there’s some kind of generational curse brought onto men (Adams) by having this apple core stuck in their throat, so to speak.
(2) this implication further ascertains* the myth that women are inherently deceptive creatures so men should be wary and slow to trust them
(3) plentyyyy women (assigned female at birth, AFAB) have Adam's apples too.

moving forward in this essay and beyond i’m just gonna refer to them as Eve’s apple or actually Autumn’s apple because this is just pissing me off the more i process and write about it.

⟿a couple celebrity case studies:

THEEE Whitney Houston

^ Emily Rudd, who played Nami in Netflix’s live action One Piece^

⟿google + reddit + fb search studies of the damage done to women’s psyche’s thinking their Autumn’s apple isn’t normal/atypical/makes them less of a woman because it’s literally called “Adam’s apple”:

⟿ tiktok case studies … on this particular post there’s a bunch of religious zealots insinuating Sandra Bullock is a man because she has an autumn’s apple and using their transphobic messaging as fodder for their hate-fueled righteousness. it’s ironic how the Hell religious zealots fear is literally the reason why being on earth feels like we’re actually in Hell. like this canNOT be how God-loving humans think and talk about each other. it can’t. and yet, there’s evidence like this that says otherwise (⚠️content warning⚠️: transphobic comments section):

author's note 💌

i honestly don’t know how to end this reflection. i am sad / angry / upset / malnourished (because i was only able to eat half of 1 meal today after this encounter). i guess i’ll end with a screengrab of our texts after the conversation on the subway platform.

texts with private information blocked out

the woman has focused on responding to the personal anecdote i shared about not choosing violence just because i felt justified in my feelings about being deceived. but i can tell she won’t be addressing the larger issue at hand. that’s okay for me. she doesn’t need to tell me whether she agrees or not. i know the impact this response has made. i understand how shame works and whether that is something she is feeling or not, it is a close cousin to avoidance. and boy, do we have a culture built intricately with shame and avoidance woven into the very fabric of our customs, conversations, and social expectations. whew… this processing the process took a lot out of me.

sending y’all love. and prayers for a kinder, gentler, more loving world for us all.

courageously yours,
nu🧚🏿‍♀️

OH! also! something that made me smile today, before this encounter:

the lights in this flower speaker were pulsing to the beat of the music in this bubble tea shop. i take it as a reminder that nature has more to teach us about staying rooted in our humanity, and connecting on a deeper frequency, than the mere mind.

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writing start time: 5:40pm

writing end time: 7:20pm

editing time: 7:30pm -8:45pm / 11:08 - 12:37am

DISCLAIMER: excuse any typos, this one took a good like 5 hours and i have to be up early for work tomorrow eep. if you made it this far you must leave a comment or send me a voice note on your thoughts. please don’t let me be writing into the void. okie i go to bed now. baiiiii.

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1. yeah, i know you thought i was about to say something else. me, too. i wish i had.

2. i’m on this app called BuyNothing where you can give away stuff you don’t need for free and also pick-up for free and it’s a great way to participate in a circular economy / meeting neighbors’ needs / buying less, sharing more / reuse reduce recycling youknowthevibe

3. this is not a real film. i just believe in the God of Nature. do with that information what you will. i grew up Catholic and attended enough bible studies to last me several lifetimes. i’m not arguing with Christians on the internet who have hateful + unhinged beliefs.

4. i don’t believe this woman is my enemy. i try not to think of individuals as my enemy, but rather systems as my enemy. but i am distraught by her words and as i’m processing, this is the only word i have access to in my madness.

5. For bell hooks: “White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy” and “Feminism is for Everybody” in U.S. History and Politics: https://usabroad.unibo.it/article/view/16500/15676