This One Is For The Hairy Girls

This one is for the hairy girls. This is for the girls who were not allowed to shave their legs till they were at least 12 years old. This is for the girls who pleaded, begged, cried to be allowed to shave sooner, to no avail. This is for the girls who secretly shaved the hair on her toe knuckles, just to wear sandalias since pants were all you felt you could wear once someone pointed out your hairy legs.

This one is for the hairy girls. This is for the girls whose arm hairs were the butt of jokes in your elementary school. This one is for the girls who bleached their arm hairs blonde, knowing full well it did not erase the thickness of your mane. This one is for the girls with hairy knuckles, who shaved her knuckles once someone else pointed out her hairiness – a hairiness she had not even noticed on herself.

This one is for the hairy girls. This is for the girls who never noticed that women also grew mustaches, to differing degrees, until her older brother made fun of the hair above her upper lip in front of a guy she liked.

This is for the girls with happy trails. This is for the girls who were told that “only boys” have happy trails. This is for the girls who were made to feel less like a girl, less like a woman, because not only were you hairy but your hair was dark and thick.

This one is for all the girls whose eyebrows had a life of their own. For the girls who tried everything to eliminate them once you discovered tweezers. This one is for the girls who obsessed with trimming and maintaining your eyebrows, only to find out that they had become a trend for white girls and that, on them, thick eyebrows were considered cute. 

This is for the girls who wished and wondered where all this hair had come from. This is for the girls who cried because you just wanted to look like those girls in your magazines, the hairless cute ones, the ones who did not have to worry about when they would have to shave next – because this became a time-consuming practice.

This is for the all the girls who have had to love themselves despite everyone around them telling them otherwise, simply because of our particular genetic disposition. Being a hairy girl is non-optional. Being a hairy girl means that this world has taught us, from infancy, how to erase ourselves with lasers, waxings, bleaching, shaving, tweezers and the like. Being a hairy girl means learning to love yourself in this new hairless version that you’ve created, or learning to love the hairiness as it is – but it means learning to love yourself either way.

This one is for all those tears you’ve shed and all that work you’ve put into loving yourself.

I see you. I am you, and I am still learning and unlearning all the self hatred. We will overcome and raise hairy girls who will be unstoppable.