Sometimes I’m heading out the door to yoga, or refolding my laundry, or getting ready for my nightly facial regimen, and I decide to casually toss my long locks up into a cute messy bun. I haphazardly gather my hair in my hands and twist a rubber band around it, but something is terribly wrong. Despite hours of trying to create the perfect messy bun, I’ve somehow managed to sculpt a flawless, tidy hairstyle, every time.
That’s right: I’m incapable of creating a sexy, casual, messy bun, no matter what I do.
“That is not a bad problem,” you might think. “Most people would love to achieve a perfectly neat bun!”
But you are wrong. It is a terrible problem that has plagued me since my embarrassingly neat teenage years. I just want to be like everyone else—effortlessly messy. Instead, I look like a performance-ready ballerina every moment of my life. Who can live like this?
Messy buns scream, “I don’t even care how I look, I’ve got places to go and things to do!” which is helpful, because you don’t want to have to scream that yourself—trust me, it gets super exhausting. Instead, my eternal chignon curse screams something entirely different: “I’m an uptight, high-maintenance bitch, and I care about things way too much.”
Everywhere I go, people see my hair neatly secured in a pristine knot, and they glare at me. I hear them whisper behind my back that I must not be very chill, and that I am not a cool girl, and–worst of all–that I visibly care about my appearance.
But I don’t! I am literally just trying to get to the bank and it’s hot and I don’t want a sweaty neck! If they only knew I spent three hours at home trying to make this bun look even remotely sloppy. How will I ever fit in with the rest of the female race??
I have watched every Youtube tutorial, read every WikiHow article, even forced my niece Kimberly teach me in an intensive eight-week seminar. But no matter how hard I try, all of my messy buns come out as perfect coifs.
Some would say that I should move forward and not be ashamed to come off as an intense, put-together woman, but I’d rather live a reclusive life in a remote cabin in the woods, far from the eyes of those who would judge me for my perfectly kempt hair. But even out here, in relative safety, my hands still shake as I collect my bedeviled strands and arrange them atop my head to evenly chop wood or turn the hand crank on my freshly painted generator.
I’m fucking carefree, okay? I just wish my buns could reflect that!
