SOLVE FOR X WHEN X = BLEACHING YOUR EYEBROWS / ALTHEA CHAMPION

WORDS ALTHEA CHAMPION VISUALS GRAYSEN WINCHESTER

SOLVE FOR X WHEN X = BLEACHING YOUR EYEBROWS

The first time I experienced the end of the world, I was four years old. It was a beautiful summer day in early July, and I was the bell of the ball at my birthday party. Adults buzzed and we as children held discreet meetings between our dolls, stuffed animals, and the lions painted on a south-facing wall.

Wanting a glass of water, I asked my dad very sweetly if he could please carry me up the stairs. It was my birthday, after all — I didn’t want to walk. He, however, in a rotten turn of events, chose to carry my best friend up the stairs before me. Naturally, I began to cry. This was a huge blow to the parameters of my dad and I’s now four-year-long relationship. I had thought I was the most important person in his world. I had thought there was no one whose needs or wants could ever surpass my own. I had thought he would prioritize me in every way he possibly could, especially when I wanted something as simple as someone to carry me up the stairs, let alone on my precious day.

Well, apparently not.

My world has come crashing to an end many times after that, as I presume many worlds belonging to preteens, teenagers, and twentysomethings have. So many times I’ve suffered the end of the world, the end of my life as I was familiar with it. And while I am sensitive and prone to dramatization and this is all a result of my privilege as a white girl who can afford to be dramatic, I don’t think I’m necessarily wrong when I perceive a demise. Each time I cry over a discernible life death (what you may refer to as “change”), I am positioned anew. Most of the time, my role, my perception, or the way I am perceived changes. I will, usually, thereafter live my life in a different way, however small the shift is, because I see things or am seen differently. After all, our perception of a thing is our reality, right up to the moment when we change our perception and our reality changes.

Think: The Truman Show and Joycean epiphanies. Think: The different times in your life when one of your key perceptions changed, and how that affected how you went on living your life. If we are to return to that fateful day in 2005, my life changed because I realized

Consider a function, something that, famously, relates an input to an output. f(x)=ax+b; y=6x+8. You plug different values into x to get different y’s, and what you are left with are points that sit on the graph and map out your function. Consider x=6, so y=44. The point sits at (6,44) on the grid. If x=-33, y=-190, and your point is (-33, -190) — so on and so forth. Let’s follow this logic: What if x = a bad haircut or bleached eyebrows or a move to Los Angeles. (Of course, we can’t necessarily solve for y, but) It affects where we sit on the grid, how we slide up and down, who we are next to.

Many people, especially those who are conditioned to be girls, become keenly aware of how they look at a young age, and how changes in that look affect how they’re perceived. Gxrls, in particular, learn how to manipulate that look in order to achieve different results.

When a friend of mine was eleven, her mom brought her to get her curly hair straightened. When the process was over, she burst into tears because she couldn’t recognize herself. She had realized that there was this part of her she didn’t know existed, a more feminine, “girly” version who wore pin straight hair.

She noticed, too, that she acted differently when her hair was straight, because she felt more feminine. Beyond that, she acted differently just knowing this part of her existed, waiting to be unlocked by a straightener and a couple hours of her time — Spiderman has a

“Does societal collapse feel the same as the collapse of a role you’ve played all your life? The social death of a part of you that never really was?”

similar relationship with his latex suit. When she realized this part of her, her world expanded to encompass these two roles.

As we grow up and experiment with our appearance, these worlds continue to swell. They swell until we get a bad haircut, at which point they burst.

Points of singularity are points where a mathematical object or point in a function set begins to behave in an unusual, undefined, or chaotic way. Many times in my teendom when x equaled a bad haircut, or someone finding out about a piece of gossip I was spreading, or accidentally liking a photo on someone’s Instagram that was posted 3+ weeks ago, or my crush not texting — or Kik-ing, rather — me back, or picking up my iPod to see cracks consuming the glass surface, I felt flung off the grid; y = life over. My heart sank to my stomach and I mourned my once promising future. These admittedly melodramatic moments, in which I thought, in all earnest, that my life was over, made me feel completely out of control, completely in panic, like I had completely lost my grip on the terms of my reality.

I feel at the brink of societal collapse when I bleach my eyebrows. When my grasp on myself and the way I look, and in effect the role I play in the world, seems tenuous.

Isn’t that, after all, the trouble with coming out? Accepting a new role at least in the eyes of those who closeted you. Does societal collapse feel the same as the collapse of a role you’ve played all your life? The social death of a part of you that never really was? I feel that when I chop my hair off and bleach my eyebrows, because it cracks my role in society wide open like a chestnut. It forces me to empty and stuff it with new things and become a new iteration of me, a kind of Frankensteining of self.

It’s alive, it really is, or at least it feels that way. And that kind of life starts with an end. My friend who has curly hair now feels empowered by this ability to switch up her look, to change the way people perceive her, to have that power over someone. In this way, she is not passively observed, but an active participant in your looking at her.

is up in the air, up for debate, completely inconclusive. Mine, yours, theirs, is tenuous, in between somewhere and inside of nowhere. Possibilities abound under the fluorescent light. Think: high school hallways. I’m anyone and nobody. Everything I could buy in an airport — pad thai from Panda Express, cheap headphones, a magazine — contains nothing of me in it, betrays nothing of me inside it.

Airport air is thin. The white walls and harsh lighting are inhuman, are of a room that makes you forget where you are. Bright lights tend to do that. Think: Don’t Worry Darling. Think: simulation. In an airport, things feel steady and still, like a river that’s always moving but never stops to consider where it’s going. You share every facet of this moment with everyone else: You, me, and they flow with something bigger, sweat clings to your, mine, and their skin and we all smell bad, we’re hungry but would rather not get Panda Express or spend $15 for a smoothie. We disappear under the artificial light, float up above the crowd, become someone totally other than who we are. I moved to Los Angeles this year. I couldn’t bring much with me, and I left most of the people who know me well behind. I didn’t have much of any creature comforts with me, so nothing tethered me to the version of myself I was before. I did not set out with any intention to change, but with nothing and no one to keep me as the someone of before, I knew, in theory, I could change every little thing about me. Plug a hundred different values in for x to get a hundred different outputs. I didn’t do that, but I rest assured knowing I could. I think this is why I always change my appearance at beginnings and ends; before or after I get a job, or move, or start or end classes. I don’t like being compared to who I’ve been. Or changing my appearance because in my head, it changes the terms of my relational agreements. Once, I disclosed to my friend that I didn’t want to bleach my eyebrows because I was talking to a someone new. I didn’t want to change myself in the middle of a beginning. I was afraid of luring them in with one version of me and then changing form once they’d taken the bait, as if I I like L.A. because people seem free to take a lot of stylistic risks, no matter where they are on a timeline. A friend of mine put it nicely, when she said everyone here plays a character, personally or professionally. Different styles populate the street and new art galleries open every day. People are always inspired to plug different inputs in to get different results.

This also, of course, leads to a bunch of people living beyond their means, because they can dress and act, mostly, however they want. The supplies are at their fingertips. Plus, there is an added pressure of looking Good. People buy things they can’t afford for simple lifestyle and aesthetic promotions. They plug a $400 shirt and $1200 boots in for x, in hopes of y equaling, well, a slay, a stunt, a serve. It’s a sort of infection, spread by a bug who does not bite, but sucks, until you max out your credit card.

I feel it sucking now.

I just made an offer on a pair No moms exist here to say: No, put it on your Christmas list and then we’ll see; No, we have food at home; No… because I said so. Of course, this is true once you grow up, but this seems especially true in L.A. The city lives without limits, lives without moms. Hopes are never dashed because 1) there’s always another opportunity, 2) there’s probably a loophole, and 3) there’s always a payment plan. Worlds, when they do implode, are only ever on a large scale and are only ever catastrophic. Think: serial murder, city council implosions, air thick with smog and smoke, bankruptcy, homelessness, rock bottom, blacklists. The apocalypse feels particularly near in Los Angeles. The kind of small-scale, subjective, life-overs are few and far between, left behind in rural or suburban or small town and limit-full teendom. And it’s only when you lose these things that you realize they are the guardrails you bump up against, and which keep you on the proverbial right track.

In L.A., every possible value for x has been plugged in before and will be again. Forget measures or measurement, restriction or limitation; I will buy German ballet flats and pins and charms and useless treasures from a Russian man parked on the side of a winding road, who wears purple gloves and a purple hat, but neglects shoes and socks. I will feel encouraged by an endless, blank, blue sky and a lackadaisical haze. And perhaps I will continue to live with few checks and fewer balances until it all implodes, until I, like many others before me, drain my bank account and must return home. Perhaps I will sprint toward a real and honest end of the world and look great while doing it. And perhaps it will all go up in flames, but at least I will be wearing beautiful shoes and carrying a box full of lovely, vaguely communist treasures — and one thing is for certain: my eyebrows will be bleached.