I’m about a year into growing my beard out now.

The first time I tried to grow my beard was in the fall of ’94. I was 19 years old and had a bit of a problem. I felt like a weird, strange person who preferred the company of other weird and strange people, but I looked fairly normal. In my undiagnosed autistic mind, I needed some kind of social signifier that would let other weird people know that I was in fact one of them and not one of the boring normal people appearances be damned. This was the source of my discontent with life and if I could just come up with a way to let my people know who I was, I would find where I fit in and be happy.

The problem was finding that signifier. My hair is thick so any attempt to grow it out quickly becomes a haystack of annoyance. I’ve never really had the courage to pull off dying my hair, especially not back then. Nor did I have the confidence of pulling off outrageous clothes and those tended to be uncomfortable anyways so that was out. What I could do though was grow my beard.

Back in ’94 beards weren’t a thing in most of the country yet. In my experience they were limited to mountain folk, bikers, and hippies. And since I was in the process of turning into a bit of a hippie it seemed like a perfect solution to my problem.

My first beard did not look particularly good and so didn’t last particularly long. I did keep growing them over the years though and it started to come in proper and looking better. Eventually I decided that I just didn’t like the way I looked without a beard and so a couple of years ago I decided that I wasn’t going to shave it off anymore going forward. I did keep it trim and neat so it would look proper and appropriate. I admit to some jealousy when I saw someone who’d let it grow. I didn’t live in a world where I could do that though and something is better then nothing.

At the beginning of 2022 I was turning into a bit of a hermit. Sobriety had left me sorting through a lot of things and with the cold weather and the still lingering pandemic I just kind of stopped leaving my house except to get groceries. I stopped getting my hair cut and stopped trimming my beard. By April the hair needed to be cut, but I’d grown accustomed to the beard being long. It had turned into a physical representation of my unmasking journey. And when I did figure out I was autistic in the summer it just seemed even more appropriate.

At this point I let my barber clean up my sideburns when I get my hair cut, but otherwise it just grows. And while it grows, I try to figure out how to make this all work.