When I was a boy, I couldn’t wait to become a man. I remember “shaving” with my father, long before I had facial hair. We would stand next to each other by the sink, lather our faces up with shaving cream, and he would show me how to pull a razor down my face, removing the shaving cream. This was before disposable razors, before razor handles that demanded specific razor blades. This was the time of safety razors, razors which took generic blades.
I can still remember, as if it were yesterday, the satisfaction I felt at removing the shaving cream from my face with long, delicate, sensuous strokes of the razor, rinsing the blade under the stream of water from the faucet, repeating until, finally, substantially all of the shaving cream had left my face and was in the basin.
I envied the basin my father produced: it had not just shaving cream in it, but little flecks of black hair. And when, inevitably, he removed the stopper from the sink, and the water and shaving cream and stubble all rinsed down the drain, the basin would be coated with a layer of tiny little black hairs, sliced off his face, clinging to the porcelain.
I wanted those hairs to be mine (or really, hairs of my own), so desperately.
I craved the evidence of adulthood, of masculinity, the stubble represented. I wanted, longed, to be a man, to produce that messy residue in the sink, a residue that so easily, so satisfyingly, would be erased moments later with a little water splashed by hand from the faucet’s stream.
Puberty-wise, I was a late bloomer. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I would stand in front of the mirror, staring at my face, hunting for any signs of incipient beard growth. There being none, and my being unsatisfied, I would reach for a needle, and would plunge the needle into my face, excavate it, seeking some, any evidence of hairs, if not yet at the surface, just beneath it.
Inevitably, eventually, my face sprouted hair, and my needles began to find their quarry. Add to that, my hair is curly. On my head, I had a big Jewfro. And, as is common among men with curly hair, and in particular among Black men, curly hair can be a problem in your face. Black men often have razor bumps, and there are lots of products designed to lessen this plague.
Ingrown hairs plagued me in my puberty, long before any real need to shave emerged. The hairs would sprout toward the surface of my flesh, but more often than not, would curl around inward, resulting not in a hair that a razor could remove, but rather in a painful, swollen bump.
With hot water and a needle, I could free a curled hair, bring its tip to the surface, give it air and life. Quickly though, this didn’t satisfy me. Once a hair was visible, I found inexplicably that I needed to remove it. Not with a razor, which would have left stubble, but with my fingers, or with tweezers.
As time marched on, as my beard growth thickened, this habit, this compulsion, worsened. Through my twenties, thirties, and into my early forties, I would spend ungodly amounts of time chasing, excavating, pulling, tweezing. This was of course incredibly destructive. My face would bleed. Marks would be left. Worse, I would find myself compelled to do this at unfortunate or even dangerous moments. On the subway, I would attack my face, and not infrequently would be told by a well-meaning, usually female, older companion on the train, that I really shouldn’t do that, that I should stop. And when confronted with the reality of what I was doing, with the reality of my not being invisible, a surge of shame would wash over me. Shame and rage. I would direct the rage at the impinging voice, the person who presumed to know what I should and shouldn’t do, who violated my wishes by seeing me, by yanking me from my imagined invisibility and non-existence into an undeniable, related existence.
Another example of this compulsion: when driving alone on a highway, I often would steer, for miles at a time, with my knees, while I used my hands to seek, to find, to tease out, to remove, hairs. This never caused an accident. But damn.
I learned the word “trichotillomania” at 22. A colleague of mine mocked our boss’s thin hair, deriding her as a “trichotillomaniac.”
In my late thirties and early forties, among other problematic aspects of my existence, I began to grapple with this habit in a new way. Theretofore, I had simply thought, “I need to stop!” It didn’t occur to me to wonder too much about what I was doing, why I was doing it, what hunger I was gratifying, what danger I was defending against.
I still remember how, on my first meditation retreat, I suddenly had an epiphany. The epiphany was inchoate, not so straightforward as “because X, then Y.” More along the lines of, “Ah, this habit, this compulsion, is born somehow of my relationship to my masculinity. It has something to do with both a longing for masculinity and a revulsion against it.”
In my sexuality, my relationship to masculinity was conflicted in ways I increasingly was coming to understand. I longed to objectify women, and felt shame at this longing. I had the sense that somehow I was both too good and not good enough for women, for sex. As I showered that day on my meditation retreat, I thought to myself, I wonder what would happen if I grew a beard. If, instead of engaging in the Sisyphean daily ritual of restoring my face to its pristine, hairless state, one devoid of evidence of my masculinity, I simply let the hairs grow. Allowed them the air and the light I sought so destructively to grant those ingrown hairs.
After years of attacking my face, my beard growth was patchy, thin, but I could grow a beard. Not quickly, not a full, thick, shaggy beard, but a close-cropped, perfectly adequate face covering, nonetheless. It took me maybe ten days or two weeks to produce something that looked, in earnest, like a beard, and not like a pubescent boy’s peach fuzz, almost, but not quite, needing a shave.
Once I reached that point, once my beard surfaced, something interesting happened: my trichotillomania simply vanished. No longer did I seek to excavate ingrown hairs. No longer did I seek coarse hairs, the texture of which somehow didn’t fit in, trying to curate an emasculated perfection on my face.
No.
Now, the closest I came was a far more socially tolerable, acceptable, pensive stroking of my beard. Something I still do to this day.
Sure, once in a while, when dysregulated, I’ll find myself idly seeking an irregular, or especially coarse, hair on my face, and will repeat the compulsive series of sensations that dominated my psychic life for so many years. But it’s infrequent, rare even, and somehow softer. If I notice I’m doing it, it’s generally not particularly difficult for me to stop. Whereas, when I was younger, this would have felt simply impossible. I couldn’t rest until I had removed the offending hair, and even the removal of one offending hair seemed to bring almost no relief, because there was always more.
Since my forties, my relationship to my masculinity has shifted. I’m more comfortable, less conflicted. God knows I still have some distance to travel – witness my relationship to fucking. But, how fortunate I am that the hair on my face is no longer a battleground in this conflict.