The first thing you learn is that it's a shared decision between you and everyone else. I learned this for the first time the day before I cut my hair. I mentioned the idea to someone at work and she followed me in the elevator begging me to re-consider because people don't like girls with short hair.
I learned it again afterwards when people approached me with horror and sadness. One girl went on about it for so long. Why I did it and why I shouldn't have and why she preferred me before I did it, that someone else stepped in and told her off. The irony is that only a year before, the first time I met her, she had just big chopped herself.
It blows my mind that something like cutting my own hair for my own personal reasons can have such a strong impact on people that really don't care about me much in their day to day lives. It's almost like their strong disapproval is supposed to serve as a punishment for daring to step outside the acceptable lines of what is 'done'.
One girl said to me that short hair is only acceptable as a look if you're a 'model type'- skinny with long limbs. Off course the unspoken implication was that I wasn't a model type and it would therefore be foolish for me to try it.
I find these comments amusing and a reflection of just how deeply we are taught as Nigerian women to internalise self-hate. We are only allowed to love ourselves within acceptable confines of whatever beauty is defined as at the time. It's not just hair. It's the way you dress and whether or not you wear make-up and how much of it you wear. It's the style you choose to sew aso-ebi fabric in and whether or not your body type is acceptable at a moment in time. I've been called 'edgy' and 'weird' and 'alte' because I dared to stray from these very narrow standards of what is acceptable and apparently, I have strayed again by daring to cut my hair without regarding myself as different or interesting or brave because of it.