Shaving Revisited... Bella Williams

The summer before my junior year I had an epiphany. Sitting by the pool with my laptop, working out the details of some short story idea I thought was ingenious at the time, I caught a glimpse of my forearms. They were,

as is common for people of both Italian and Polynesian descent, covered in a crisscrossing layer of thick, dark hair. This was not my first time realizing that I had hair on my arms. Far from it, in fact. In my elementary school days I had been painfully aware of the hair on my arms. So unbearably aware that I wore jackets with long sleeves most months of the year, and when it got too hot I just kept my arms crossed.

This poolside summer day was different.

Scanning over the short strands of keratin that had been the bane of my tween

existence, I felt not the shame and disgust whom I had accepted as my constant middle school companions, but something so unfamiliar to me I could barely comprehend it: indifference. I sat, dumbfounded, struggling to process the fact that I could see myself, arm hair and all, and not care.

Shaving Revisited

An Exercise in Melodrama

This brought forth new realizations, new questions. If I had the option to just not care about the hideous, appalling, repellent hair on my arms, what other insecurities was I still dragging around? What other bits of self hatred was I still clinging to? t was a matter of time before I decided to stop shaving my legs. What good had the fiveedged sacrificial blade brought me? Upon what altar had I laid my time, my self-image, sometimes my own blood? No longer would I accept as fact that my worth was based on my ability to conform to what someone else thought a girl should look like. I felt invincible. I had conquered my demons without getting up from my pool chair.

I was swiftly pulled back down to earth by my mother. “You need to shave,” she said. “We have Church tomorrow.”

I tried explaining my revelation to her, rambling about corporatemanufactured insecurities and the social construction of beauty. She would hear none of it. “Why do you complain so much?” she said.

I couldn’t argue with that. You, dear reader, are by now familiar with my tendency towards garishly purple diatribes. You can imagine the melodrama my mother has to put up with on a daily basis. o I sulked up to my room, dejectedly sheared myself of the spines I had come to behold with a strange sense of pride, and went to bed. But sleep I could not. I refused to be silenced. Even a cat declawed can still hiss, still bite.

ho was there to complain to? I wasn’t going to start grumbling to myself at ungodly hours of

the night like some kind of madwoman. No, I was going to write to myself at ungodly hours of the night like some kind of madwoman. y morning I had a very, very rough draft. It was a satire, an online makeup tutorial from some kind of alternate bizarro world, where eyelashes must be carefully plucked each morning, and nostrils are to be hidden from the public. I read it out loud for the first time at a Georgetowner coffeehouse. I never actually expected anyone to like it. I never expected anyone to laugh. But laugh they did as I read it again and again, and I later published it in Georgetowner 2019. I felt a renewed confidence in myself just as strong, if not stronger, than the weaponized apathy in which I had smothered my middle-school insecurities. Maybe I couldn’t fix all my problems, but I could complain about them, and I could complain about them in a way someone might just enjoy listening to.

— Bella Williams