When I was in kindergarten—and very much in the closet as transgender—I had begun to crave a ponytail like I saw on many of the girls in my class. I’m well aware that for many girls and women, the ponytail is a “bare-minimum” style, often for lazy days, but the girls I saw in my class emulated the women I saw on television who were strong, confident, and successful. I thought they were cool, and I understood immediately I could never have one.

Even at six, I knew better. I was raised in deeply conservative Texas, in a world with firmly cemented gender roles. I was a boy and I had better keep to “boy things.” The bouncy ponytail of my dreams? Not a boy thing.

In 1999, when I was 12, the U.S. Women’s National Team won their second World Cup, and Mia Hamm became a personal icon. For weeks, I dreamed of what it would be like to have the freedom to sport a ponytail like Hamm. By then, I was fully aware of a desire within me to be a girl, but I kept it buried in the back of my brain, suppressed whenever possible. Still, it sometimes crept up, summoned by the most mundane signifiers of female-ness. Mia Hamm was confident and beautiful and successful, and although I had no sense of what “womanhood” meant to me, I couldn’t help but feel like her hair represented all the things I was missing. I wanted an authentic life. I wanted to feel confident. I wanted a ponytail.

I got through high school by pushing these thoughts down deep and leaning into whatever “male” things I could stomach. I played football. I engaged in some sort of half-hearted male performance when I interacted with relatives, including one who told me to “stop listening to faggot music” and was deeply upset after I purchased a scented lotion from Bath & Body Works. I joined the military—and even went into the infantry, which at the time coincidentally excluded women.

I did the things I was told a “male person” should do, believing I’d eventually be cleansed of this painful longing. Instead, the facade exacerbated my depression and anxiety. I went to therapy for years had numerous uncomfortable conversations, and came out as a trans woman in late 2017. It is the best choice I’ve ever made. It saved me.

But it took my hair took a lot longer to catch up with the new me. I’d grown accustomed to army-issue crewcuts, which grow out fast. It didn’t occur to me immediately that the hair I’d dreamed of would take years to come in, and I didn’t feel confident enough to wear a wig. So I had to wait it out, for over a year, fiddling with my hair after a shower to see if it was long enough yet and consistently bummed when it wasn’t quite there.

I hadn’t tried putting my hair up in months when one evening in late July, I absentmindedly grabbed a hair tie off my shelf and made a go of it. After some awkward handling and smoothing of rogue strands, I adjusted the band high on the back of my head and turned toward the mirror. I don’t know how to adequately articulate the combination of happiness and relief that I felt in that moment. It’s just hair, I thought. But then I glimpsed the waves, how the strands bundled together so beautifully. I couldn’t help it. I got emotional.

Here I stood on a summer night; with a life my six-year-old self wouldn’t have dared to imagine. I’m 32 now and old enough to admit my anxiety over seemingly trivial things. I think some part of me was worried this thing I’d wanted for more than 25 years would look terrible once I finally got it. I’m pleased to report: It was perfect.

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