The other day I got a haircut. Not a trim. Not a shaping of the same long bob I’ve had for decades. No, I threw caution to the wind and got a short pixie cut, modeled after a page in People magazine I’d torn out to bring to my hairdresser, Marissa. Marissa is a wizard with hair. Marissa has been babying my bob for years, telling me I have terrific hair in that low, gravelly voice she has—a voice that makes me feel beautiful even when I walk in pale and pimply, my hair a straggly mess.

“You have great hair,” she says, running her fingers through it, gazing at me in the mirror. “People must tell you that all the time.” No, Marissa, people do not tell me that all the time, but I still blush a little and decide to believe her. Marissa’s own hair is long, thick, and curly, running in waves down her back. She is the kind of young woman who is gorgeous without flaunting it, and I get a little tongue-tied the minute I sit down in her chair.

At her salon, Honey, they believe a haircut should be a full body experience. First we choose aromatherapy for the scalp massage—citrus? wintergreen? lavender?—and then she oils up her palms, cups them under my nose. I close my eyes and sniff in deeply, an exchange that feels oddly intimate—her glistening hands just inches from my mouth, the quiet settling between us, calm scent filling my body. Without a word, she places those hands on my scalp, massages with deep thrusts of her fingers all along my skull, my neck, my shoulders. I sink deeper and deeper into the chair, let myself get all rag doll on her. This puts me in a good mood, inclined to love whatever she’ll do to me next.

On this day, with my wrinkled excerpt from People in hand, I told her I was ready—ready for something new, something different. And before I could even hand her my picture of Carey Mulligan, Marissa grabbed the current Vogue and showing me the same star, her hair a wild criss-cross on her scalp. Marissa’s eyes gleamed. “Oh boy,” she said, “I’ve been waiting to do this for years.”

*

I’m blind without my glasses. I take them off during a haircut, so the whole time I don’t really know what is happening. The minute the world goes blurry, I’ve surrendered; I’ve left it up to the beauty gods to show mercy on me.

I can hear the rapid click of the scissors, changing in timbre as they near my ears and then float away again. I can feel the comb’s teeth slide across my scalp, smell the fruity scent of hair product, and the slight astringent tang of newly cut hair. I can feel the cut bits dropping like wet feathers on my shoulders, can hear the whisper of them falling to the floor. I can hear the rush of water at the shampoo stations, and the soundtrack of women speaking to women about boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, life.

I keep my eyes closed, feel myself falling into a deep rest if the stylist will let me, if she doesn’t make me talk. I usually take off my glasses in the daylight hours only during yoga class and napping, so my automatic relaxation response kicks in. My breathing goes deeper. My brain settles in its cavernous socket. I think of it as haircut meditation, if I’m with a stylist I trust. Snip, om, snip, om, snip, om—the rhythm of the scissors is enough to woo me into a dream. I live alone, and so I embrace any gentle touch where I can get it. I nuzzle into those expert hands and would purr if I didn’t maintain some smidgen of decent comportment.

If I open my eyes during all this, I have only the vaguest sense of what is going on over there, in the mirror, this figure flitting around my head, her hands sweeping in gestures that resemble a shaman’s. I don’t even really exist; I’m just a silhouette whose outlines keep changing.

*

I once broke up with a hairdresser in the middle of the night. She was the kind of stylist who insisted you make your next appointment at the end of the current one, a policy that kept her books consistently full. So there was always one more appointment to put in your calendar, a fact that seemed wonderful if you were pleased with your cut—and dreadful if you were not.

I’d been going to her for years. Let’s call her Becky. She gave me a wonderful cut the first time we met, using all those expensive and environmentally friendly Aveda products, and when we looked together in the mirror we both smiled with satisfaction at work well done. That’s all it takes to devote you to a hairdresser for years, even when the relationship—as many do—fails to live up to that first date.

This relationship can be as intimate as any romance, maybe more so. After all, how many people stand with you at a mirror and scrutinize your face— that most vulnerable terrain, where we’ve been secluded with our own ratty selves, where we’ve zoomed in to finger every imperfection. Or we’ve stood back, trying to take in ourselves in our totality, but it’s impossible because the picture keeps shifting the longer we look. But here, in the salon, our hairdresser stands behind us, looks with us, says what are we going to do today? You’re allowed this brief impression that you’re truly in charge here, that you have some accurate sense of what will make you beautiful. For a moment, just a moment, the possibility of beauty—true beauty, innate beauty—is open to us. The possibility of transformation. You feel as though you’re being seen, truly seen, for who you are.

But, alas, we never get the same haircut twice. This hairdresser, Becky—she had her own problems, talked more frequently about troubles with her husband, took phone calls while snipping at my bangs. At my last haircut with her, I asked for something different, something new, but when I put on my glasses I gasped and tears sprang to my eyes. It looked as though I had on a helmet made of stiff artificial curls; I looked a hundred years old.

“What’s wrong?” she snapped. “This is exactly what you asked for.” I nodded, bit back the tears, while she blew it out roughly, tried to fix the style, but her next client was already waiting. We made an appointment for six weeks hence, and three weeks later I took the coward’s way out and called the salon just before midnight. I didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want to have the “it’s not you, it’s me” conversation. I left a breezy message, something about being called out of town and needing to cancel, I’d reschedule for another time. I hung up, heart pounding, knowing I’d never see her again.

*

While I’m getting a haircut, I sometimes imagine myself as one of those women on a makeover show—What Not to Wear in particular, with no-nonsense Stacy and funny Clinton. I’ve often wished they would follow me for a week; I want them to jump out of the dressing room and catch me before I buy yet one more crew neck black t-shirt. I wouldn’t mind their sarcastic comments as long as it resulted in a brand new look that emphasizes all that is right with me.

I want to be in the chair with their stylist, Tim, who would tell me I have fabulous eyes and cheekbones. I want him to smile his sly smile and say, are you ready for something different? I want him to fuss, to explain how this cut will enhance all my strong features. I want him to do all this while I can’t see what he’s doing, and I want him to turn me around to face the mirror, reveal my beautiful self in one unveiling swoop.

On every episode, at some point, the women cry—even the toughest of them. The What Not To Wear team grinds them down, forces them to yield the elaborate facades they’ve created for themselves. These are not conventionally beautiful women: they have thick waists, or big noses, or narrow shoulders, and always when they first start shopping with Stacy and Clinton’s rules in mind, they find themselves adrift. They have no idea anymore what they look like; they had thought they looked good; they had been dressing themselves for decades. They don’t want to be judged on their looks, they say, though in the mirrors they zero right in to the areas that most distress them.

Stacy always makes them say I am beautiful. Say it again, she insists, and tears glisten in their carefully made-up eyes.

*

It’s only hair, they say, it will grow back. This, when you come home with a mangled haircut, a frizzy perm, a color distinctly unsuited to your skin. It’s only hair.

True. But true also the distress bordering on anguish when you look in the mirror and see not who you think you are, but who you dread: the ugly you, the one you knew lurked there all the while.

Over coffee, during a banter of gossipy camaraderie, a friend once said to me, of another woman, “She cried when she got a bad haircut, can you imagine?” This friend works a domestic violence hotline. She trained to be a paramedic, works volunteer shifts at the fire station. I can understand her sentiment—in the larger scheme of things, it does seem rather petty to cry at a bad haircut—and I nodded with her that morning, pretended to agree.

But oh, how I have cried at bad haircuts! How I’ve come home and squinted at myself in the mirror, pulled at my hair, snarled. I’ve even, much to my shame, thrown the hairbrush across the room, cursed, crumbled in a heap on the bed. I once got a perm, god knows why, that made me a bubblehead for a good month.

I once got highlights that streaked in zebra stripes across the crown of my head. I once got a 5-minute haircut at Great Clips that left me with bangs so short they looked like they must hurt. They did hurt, oh yes, they did.

*

Marissa made gleeful little clucks as she cut my hair off. “This is going to be so great,” she said again and again. I felt the tip of her finishing scissors right against the corner of my eye and did my best to stay still as a statue.

“Okay,” she said, “have a look!” I put on my glasses for the big reveal, and I did the little gasp the makeover clients have perfected. It really was beautiful. The color seemed to have deepened, and red highlights glistened among the brown strands. My cheekbones had suddenly resurrected. My eyebrows looked thinner. My eyes were green again, round and wide as that baby’s delighted gaze.

Marissa said, “I know, I know, isn’t it great!” She said the cut looked “enlightening,” when she meant to say it lightened things up. But I think she had it right the first time. Enlightenment can sometimes be this simple: pruning away everything that hides who you are.

I seem to be a kinder person with this haircut: more patient, more willing to forgive. Why would this be? Perhaps because with my face finally exposed—my cheeks highlighted, my eyes bright—I’m kinder to myself. I look in the mirror and say hey good lookin’. My skin seems to have cleared up into a semblance of normalcy. I ruffle my hair good-naturedly to give it the Vogue cover look (though it settles almost immediately into a comfortable side part, kind of tomboyish—more Gwyneth Paltrow than Cary Mulligan). I buy a top with a flattering neckline; I buy new earrings that dangle next to my jaw. I think Stacy and Clinton would approve. They stand behind me at the mirror and demand that I say it: I am beautiful. Then I wink my awkward wink—more of a spastic blink—and invite us all home for tea.