CNF: Mind Over Matter

by Amelia Clare Wright

 

When I am twenty-one, I grow out my pubic hair. I have never before seen what it looks like; I don’t know the color or the length or the way it curls. I began shaving as soon as my first hair grew in. It was blonde. And that was the last I saw of any hair somewhere other than my head for six years.

When I was nineteen, my boyfriend told me he wanted to see me “with hair down there,” so I tried to grow it out for the first time.

It was itchy.

I made it two weeks before shaving it all off again, didn’t know hair growing in would itch so much. Prickles like cactuses poking through my thin underwear and I couldn’t take it.

But I am twenty-one now, and I am determined to learn what it is to feel natural.

To my surprise, I love the way it looks. The thick bush of hair, not blonde this time, is a reminder of my humanity. I feel real in my body. I feel like a woman, like someone who belongs to herself. Like someone growing and shedding and making room.

It still itches.

This time I last for months before I can’t take it and shave it all off again, meticulously, painstakingly, centimeter by centimeter, clearing the growth. When I am finished, my first thought is that I feel like a naked mole rat.

I feel bare and fake—plastic. I am Barbie-doll clean again, and I am itch-free.

 

I don’t know — as I sit here writing this, trying to decide if I should grow it out again — which is more important. What does it mean to “feel good”? Psychologically, long pubic hair grounds me in a way my body never has before, like I can look at myself as something more than a tool for others, like I have accepted my womanhood and chosen to honor it instead of clear it away. Physically, I would tear them out one by one to relieve the itching.

The question is one of priority. I am always telling myself to do things because of the way they make me feel, not because of the way they make me look. But this has always been easy, clear-cut—body helps mind; mind helps body. I remind myself in the gym that I am there to build a comfortable home in my body, not for the way it tones and slims and makes me desirable to others. The visceral improves the cerebral. I fill my acrylics every month because it is a part of the persona I am creating for myself. There is no negative bodily consequence. I haven’t had to negotiate between the comfortable psychological and the practical physical before.

 

Here I am, the physical challenging the psychological, the psychological disagreeing with the physical.

Here I am, flourishing mentality, and a landscape that makes me feel powerful, a desire to scratch.

Here I am on shaky ground, a smoothness that makes me uneasy, physical relief.

Where do I want to be?

 

I am inclined to follow my mind. I am inclined to put my mental well-being over corporeal comfort. But that means I have to unwind my taut perception that a body at ease is a mind at ease. It means admitting that the way I look (or the way I feel about the way I look) is more important than the comfort of my skin.

When I am twenty-one, I grow out my pubic hair.

I shave it off.

I grow it back.

 

Amelia is a recent graduate of Emerson College with a degree in Communications Studies and the intention to pursue an MFA in nonfiction creative writing. She grew up in Baltimore City and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts where she is currently working on a memoir about her body. This is her first publication. 

 

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