It all started in a little shopping center off Highway 79 and Back Beach Road, roughly across from the tax assessor’s office. I didn’t have much business out on the west end of The Beach when I was five years old. Thomas’s Donuts was out that way, I guess, and if you kept driving west along the coast you’d hit 30A and all the richer, nicer things between Panama City Beach and Destin.

I got my first haircut at a little salon in that little shopping center. I think. The first one that I can remember. It felt significant.

There I was, dangling my little toothpick legs over the edge of my chair, under a gallery wall of Patrick Nagel art and black-and-white portraits of impossibly-styled models. There was a worn copy of Southern Living on a wicker-and-glass coffee table. There was a bowl of Dum Dums at the register. There was a nice lady in a big, black smock. She was talking to my mom.

She’s the one who cut my hair, and that’s all I remember about my first haircut. It happened, I left, time passed, and then I came back for more.

I do remember the routine. Every time I hopped up into that seat, the stylist would look at me through the mirror and go on and on about my hair. It was so thick, she said, and it grew so fast. She would hold a sandy-brown lock between her fingers and marvel at it. She would direct my attention to the floor, and make me marvel at all the clippings. I didn’t know whether to be proud or feel guilty.

And so, staring down the enormous burden of potential greatness, I shrugged. I looked at my voluminous, vivacious hair, and one day I asked for it to be chopped short and slathered in plasticizing products. It must have broken that poor lady’s heart to hear a kid like me with a pale complexion and giant forehead come in, month after month, year after year, and ask for that.

I did not age into this particular hairdo. My sense of style through middle school was, let’s say, strange. We went through a lot of cheap, blue hair gel in my household. To this day I couldn’t tell you who I was trying to emulate or where I got this idea of how I wanted to present to the world. No one on the planet wore their hair the way I was wearing it back then.

That sort of individuality might be laudable in someone else’s story, and I guess I could tell it that way, but more than anything I knew who I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to look local. I didn’t want to be a beach person. I didn’t want to look like I belonged in northwest Florida because, well, I didn’t feel like I belonged among the tanned, mop-topped surfers and the slick southern dilettantes.

I looked weird for a while and I spent a lot of haircuts to keep it that way.

My grandpa on my dad’s side was really, really bald. That’s one of my strongest memories of the man besides his soft-spoken, kind nature and his unmatched sweet tooth. Every recollection of our time together is crowded with random bowls of rocky road ice cream and candy bars. The abstract concepts of grandpa and chocolate are short-circuited together in my brain; I cannot think about one without the other.

Certainly the soft-spokenness and the chocolate-seeking are dominantly encoded into our genes on the Barnhart side of the family. Was it silly to expect my hair to turn out any different?

Look. I had my reasons.

I had bad information. My sources lied to me. There is a bit of popular wisdom that baldness is governed from the mother’s side of the familial Punnett square. That’s what I’d heard at some point early in my life and so that’s what I chose to believe until proven otherwise. My mom’s dad– the cowboy of the Ozarks– had way more hair at 65 than Grandpa Barnhart.

I had nothing to worry about, I thought. I had genetics on my side.

My own dad had a full head of hair for as long as I knew him, up until he started chemotherapy back in 2000. He preempted the side-effects of those curative poisons by buzzing it all off before the treatments began. He got it cut at the sprawling medical complex where our family all lived out of a hotel for a few weeks. I remember my dad joked that they didn’t offer him a lot of styling options at the cancer hair salon.

And that wasn’t the end of the joke. To his surprise and everyone else’s grim amusement, my dad didn’t experience radical hair loss from the chemo. He could have kept a little hair.

“Damn,” I remember thinking at the time. “I bet I got those hair genes. The chemo-proof hair genes.”

The scientific reality of hair genetics is more complicated than the aforementioned popular wisdom, as scientific reality tends to be. Recent academic studies associate male pattern baldness and hair loss with both X-linked and autosomal genes— over a hundred of them, in total, working in concert to goad the expression of certain proteins or block certain other proteins or play some small part in a complex cascade of biological processes that culminate in a rather disappointing receding hairline.

It turns out, inheritance is not so simple.

Genes. Genes blessing you with fast-growing, stylist-shocking locks. Genes transforming a few cells in my dad’s esophagus into a metastasizing nightmare. Genes flippantly resigning his dad to Alzheimer’s disease and my other granddad— the one with a little more hair— to colon cancer.

Genes replicating and multiplying from ancestors unknown across generations to culminate in an eighth grader with a bad haircut reading Tom Clancy novels at the oncologist’s office, with absolutely no genes coded to tell that kid to chill out.

Fast forward a few years. Someone finally told me to chill out.

Specifically, what she said was, “Your hair looks good today.”

We were standing out in front of the high school, before the first bell on a very typical, overcast, breezy morning. I was au natural, with my hair towel-dried and frizzed . There was no product and there was no shape. It was not a look, but more the byproduct of indifference.

She caught me off-guard. She said my hair looked good. My hair, of all things! She said my hair looked good on that particular today, of all days.

How many folks remember the first moment they felt… I dunno, “seen,” for lack of a better word?

There are other, more conventionally popular milestones of attraction and romance. We accumulate these moments over our respective lifetimes and retell them on occasion with a careful balance of wistful nostalgia and wincing cringe. Everyone has a standard, boilerplate retelling of their first kiss or first dance or the night they lost their virginity, ready to deploy if the topic comes up after a couple of drinks. It stands to reason that for many people, a kiss or a dance was the first moment they felt seen.

But the moment can be mundane. It can be benign and downright unromantic. It can happen in a space outside attraction. A routine compliment on an otherwise throwaway morning can drag you out of the shadows and into the physical world. A small kindness can make you feel seen.

And so there I was. Seen. Dragged from the shadows and into the physical world because of my hair.

I said, “oh, uh, really?”

She pulled her books up against her chest and broke eye contact for a second and said something like, “Yeah, are you trying something new?”

Sure. Yes. I’ll try anything. I’ll be anyone. Just say the word. Just see me again.

I read the shock on my mom’s face from across the airport lobby. She’d been waiting there, eager to see me for the first time since I moved to Houston. Maybe I should have warned about my hair before the Thanksgiving holiday. Maybe I should have cut my hair at some point between August and November.

My hair was long.

I looked different. Over the course of a few months I’d learned how my hair curled over itself in broad tangles when afforded the opportunity. It bounced over the tips of my ears and poured forth over my forehead. I looked like a college student who was exploring the boundaries of socially-normal grooming habits, and I think that’s a fair description of exactly who I was toward the end of 2005.

I looked unserious.

And I loved being unserious. The big, audacious goal of my life up to that point had been to go to college; once I arrived, I let my hair down, so to speak. I became sleazy, I watched deadlines slip right past me, and I partied like it wasn’t the worst idea in the world. For the first time in five years I didn’t feel entombed within a serious childhood tragedy or some serious academic ambitions.

Every morning I was greeted by a slightly different, increasingly unfamiliar reflection in the communal bathroom mirror. His sad, serious eyes became vacant and dazed. He shaved too often to grow a beard, but he never really cleaned up, either. His hair kept growing longer. All of these changes were welcome because, when you don’t know better, letting yourself go is a pretty convincing substitute for agency.

Effortless abandon is sick as hell. It has been since time immemorial. Sure, effortless abandon doesn’t convey conventional social signals like “you can depend on me” or “I would make a good parent.” You don’t need those messages when you’re eighteen years old. When you’re a college freshman trying to make new friends, you need your appearance to say simple things like, “I won’t hurt you” and “you can’t hurt me.”

And that’s all great until you’re plucked from the hedgerows and hurled back into the past, to the place where you grew up. It’s all great until someone you love sees you from across the airport lobby and their expression changes from excitement to deep, deep concern.

It’s all great until your mom can’t find you under all that hair.

I finally understood that I was losing my hair a few years ago.

My partner at the time told me, “it’s cool that you don’t really wear hats.” She said she liked my confidence. I think I just smiled, clueless as to why that would be cool.

Toward the end of our relationship she suggested that I should try minoxidil.

I have a lot of hats now. Some of them are more serious than others.

I’ve got a box of film photographs cataloging my entire childhood, roughly sorted into equally-sized “baby” and “not baby” collections. A couple of my favorite “not baby” photos of me were taken on a high school trip to DC. A few of us from my AP US History class traveled up for the 2005 Presidential Inauguration.

There’s so much to love about those photos. The absolute drip of my dad’s old Sony Discman hat? The fact that my hair is getting longer? The coy smile on a seventeen-year-old trying to cosplay Michael Moore at George W. Bush’s second fucking inauguration? The touch of irony that I’d actually live in DC twenty years later?

For me, it’s the beard. See that little bit of chinstrap? You might have to squint but, trust me, it was there. My beard was growing. I was so, so excited.

In the years since those photos were taken, I’ve discovered more confidence and expressed myself more completely with my beard than I ever did screwing around with the hair on top of my head. When the beard draws a comment, I feel seen. When it looks good, I can feel proud because I sculpted it and styled it myself. When I cut it too short, I agonize— but not for long. It never takes a long time to grow back.

Presentation is important. Human brains are hardwired to notice all sorts of objectively ridiculous details about the physicality of others as well as the people they belong to, including the shape and length and color and texture of the hair on our bodies. It’s all very stupid. Imagine all the tears shed and all the labor toiled over the past millennia for the sake of hair. Hair, of all things!

And yet, I’ll readily admit: There is a real satisfaction in establishing an active and healthy relationship with the way you look. For me, the keyword was active. You can try to defy your genes, if you want to. You can change according to the kind compliments of others. You can buy hats. You can try looking like a Pitchfork writer from 2008 with really strong opinions about Sufjan Stevens and decide, yeah, that’s me.

So change your hair up. Grow a beard. Find a skincare routine. Get your entire butthole waxed. Whatever, man. Existence is a physical experience and you might as well make the most of it. Everyone else is already doing it and they’re having a great time.

As for my hair, well, it’s still around. If I eat my vitamin gummies every day and continue to treat my body with more respect than I did in college (see above), then I reckon I’ll hold onto this Paul Giamatti hairline and workable thickness for another decade. That’d make me happy. I’m a reasonable man who doesn’t want for much.

Just a beard, really.