PicoBlog

The basic reason for my unusual style of facial hair is that because of my burn scars, I have no hair on the right side of my face. Of course, I could choose to shave the other side and look less asymmetrical, which I did for many years. The somewhat more complex story behind the half beard started with a monthlong hike I took when I turned fifty, during which I didn’t shave and hardly saw what I looked like. When the hike ended, I didn’t like how my facial hair looked and had no plans to keep it. But it was a reminder of the trip, so I decided to postpone shaving for a few more weeks.

Then something unexpected happened: I started receiving emails and social media notes from people thanking me for the half beard. They told me that they also had injuries and that my openness with my scars gave them a bit of courage to expose their own. Those messages brought up memories of my early days being out in the world with very visible scars. People would point at me and sometimes laugh. Parents would tell their kids, “This is what happens when you play with fire.” It was pretty awful.

So I decided to keep the half beard. It did make more people look at me in a funny way and more kids point, but I felt that going back to shaving would be hiding my injuries instead of being clear and open with them.

Over the following months, something even more unexpected happened: the oddity of the half-beard helped me feel a greater acceptance of myself. And not just of my facial scars. I have lots of other asymmetries because of my burns, and somehow having the half beard helped me change my attitude toward them, so much so that I now just think of them as a part of who I am. They simply document a chapter of my life story.

This new self-acceptance made me realize something about the daily act of standing in front of the mirror shaving that I’d done for so many years. In my case, it was not simply shaving; it was also engaging in a process to make me look less asymmetric and disguise my injury a bit. What was the impact of such daily self-concealment on the way I was thinking about myself and my scars? In retrospect, I realized that shaving/concealing was holding me back from accepting my injured self. Now that I’ve stopped, things have gotten much better for me.

As a social scientist who is supposed to understand human nature, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that the benefits of my half-beard took me by surprise. I had not even the slightest intuition of the positive perspective change that my decision not to shave would bring about. (I also didn’t have the slightest intuition that I would become known, in shadowy corners of the internet, by the Harry Potter–esque mon- iker “The Half-Beard Professor.”) Maybe it is another reminder that our intuitions are limited and that we need to be more willing to experiment with all kinds of changes, even if we initially expect that they will not bring us any benefits.

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