The DonnaBlog: Spare no expense

As I type this I'm sitting in a hotel room near Birmingham, AL. I'm on my way to Dallas to pick up my other pup and drive him back to Charleston.

There is quite a bit of emotion wrapped up in this. Leaving him with my mom in early February was one of the hardest emotional traumas I've experienced in a long time. One of the things that allowed me to leave that house without him was justifying to myself that it was in his best interest....that my mom's stable world was a better fit for him than my own gypsy life. Anyway - without going into too much detail - I'm headed back to get him. I don't mind admitting - I'm excited.

Cody man!!!

There are a few things in life where I spare no expense. I have no problem justifying additional cost, distance, or effort if I can convince myself that I'm getting what I need.

My make-up is one of those things. 95% of my stuff is from MAC. They earned my loyalty many years ago and I've probably got a small store's worth of their stuff.

Another of those things is my hair.
Over the years I've put my hair into the hands of a number of people who ultimately became dear friends. It's typically more than just a service-related thing for me....in order to give my hair some "personality" it involves knowing a little about me. It's a relationship....a long-term relationship. And, in some instances, a long-distance relationship.

At the very beginning of my transition I had convinced myself that in order to be percieved as feminine I needed long hair. As wrong-minded as that was, learning that I was wrong was an important step in the development of my ideals of feminity, masculinity, and who-the-heck-cares.

I'll never forget my earliest wigs. While I tried to grow my hair out to a sufficient length I wore them to my first support group meetings, and on my initial tentative steps out into the world. Funny thing is, they probably drew more attention my way than they deflected but that's the thing about a crutch....it's not a rational thing, it's an emotional one.

I will never forget the night I took my wig off...and it hasn't been on since. I had recently come back from seeing Dr. O and my own hair was still very short. But the wig was hot, it was unruly, and most importantly it put pressure on the spot in the hairline where Dr. O had made his incision. It hurt.

I decided then and there that whatever hair I had was the hair I'd use. In a way - it became part of my identity.

In the early days I kept it long. Eventually one of my hairdressers in Austin asked if I wanted to be bold and change things up and we cut it pretty short. It stayed that way for 3 or 4 years before I eventually started growing it out again.

I've done some research and found a hairdresser that I wanted to entrust with a little bit of a shorter, layered, lighter style. Here's the result (pardon the crude photo....it's hard to take a good side picture of your hair in a hotel room bathroom mirror). The mark of a good hairstyle in my book is that it looks just as good when you style it yourself as when the stylist does it at the salon, and how it looks a week later.