True things about me that people have refused to believe:

I am slightly deaf, wear hearing aids, and often can’t understand what people are saying if I’m not wearing them. Deafness is invisible, and I don’t talk like a deaf person, because my hearing when I was young was excellent. I have had friends flat out disagree with me about it. “Oh, come on, Delia,” was what a friend shouted from the sidelines when I asked my fencing referee to speak more clearly. It doesn’t help that my efficient hearing aids are hard to notice.

The thing I said was wrong with the computer is, in fact, what is wrong with the computer. Tech support at my job invariably refused to accept my statements, over and over and over again, until finally they would once again be up against a wall and have to admit that what I had said to begin with was, in fact, what was wrong. My husband, a computer consultant, knew better than to contradict me outright, but he generally didn’t believe me, either. I wish to state for the record that I have been using computers since the late 1970s, and I know when something isn’t the result of user error because I have, over the years, made all the possible user errors and learned from them. Ask me about the time I deleted the DOS directory on my work computer. I managed to reinstall DOS without anyone finding out, and I have never done that again. Ask me why, before calling tech support this time, I restarted my computer, checked to make sure everything was plugged in, turned the power off completely and turned it back on, checked the circuit breaker box, and ran a diagnostic or two.

I have ADHD, and it’s profound. It was my mother (when I was in my fifties) who refused to believe that, and she and my sister even set out to prove me wrong, by taking an on-line test on my behalf, in secret. They did not get the results they expected. “We thought you were doing it on purpose,” she said afterwards, bewildered. I will not go into what “it” was, but there was a reason most of my parents’ arguments were about me, all through my childhood and young adulthood. My Ph.D. supervisor, likewise, told me flatly, “You don’t have ADHD,” mostly because she was an expert in education, and because she refused to believe in ADHD because it was a tool of misandry and oppression, and because I was too smart. Even though she had watched me blurt, twitch, and interrupt in all my classes. Even though she knew how long it had taken me to wrangle my dissertation. Even though I have the staring spells and other symptoms of classic ADHD. She wasn’t contradicting me when she disagreed with me, she was contradicting the whole oppressive world of education. I sympathize, and I get it, but geez, Marilyn, get a grip.

My head is large. Apparently, no, it isn’t. This is a funny disbelief, and it’s persistent. People just contradict me when I tell them that. A woman in a hat shop kept insisting once, until in frustration I seized one of her medium hats and tried to pull it down. I looked like Stan Laurel. She fell silent, rather than admit I was telling the truth. I wear a men’s extra large, which means mostly baseball caps, knit beanies, or nothing. Not for me the elegant little confection with a sprightly feather. I would look like a pitbull wearing a teacup.

I’m normal height for a woman, not short. I’ve had other women, more than once, insist I was shorter than them, even when we stood back to back and even when everyone could see our heads were at the same exact level. Maybe this is part of people’s problem with my head size. Something about my build – longish torso, large head, strong bones, big butt – makes me look like I’m about five feet tall (I’m 5’5″), with tiny feet (my feet are also normal size). This also leads people to think I don’t weigh as much as I do, which is weird, but okay. All my life, I’ve had friends tell me they need to lose weight, when they weigh thirty pounds less than I do, and it’s not because they think I have the same problem.

Why am I thinking about all this today? Well, I went to get a haircut yesterday. I said to my new stylist, “It’s really really thick and heavy hair, and it’s really stubborn, so you’re going to have to–“

“I’ll have to texturize it,” she said, nodding. I agreed. Ask me how I am so familiar with the term “texturizing,” which means getting rid of bulk.

I hoped she understood what she was in for. She thought she understood what she was in for. She was wrong.

An hour and a half later, she had not finished cutting my hair. Finally, she said, “Your hair really is thick,” and got down to work properly. Luckily, she didn’t have a client scheduled after me.

Despite her twenty years of experience, or more precisely because of her twenty years of experience, she thought she knew better than the woman who has been dealing with impossibly stubborn hair all her life. Nobody has hair like mine, so that’s fair. It’s not just thick, it’s stupid thick. It has body the way a rhinoceros has body. It has strong opinions about life, and it expresses them.

This is not possible. At my age, she should be trying to fluff it up, to conceal my visible pink scalp, not hacking at it with thinning shears.

Heck, she didn’t believe I had a big head, either, even though she was looking at the two of us together in her mirror when I said it; she obviously had a tidy little skull on top of her graceful neck, like a pencil eraser, and mine, despite my now-short hair, looked like a goddamn forest mushroom.

Perhaps this life-long experience with people contradicting me is responsible for my own contrary personality.

Nah.

But at least I got a decent hair cut. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll remember when I go back in February that I’m the one with the weird head of hair. Probably not. People generally don’t remember they were wrong about me. I’m used to that by now.