Every time I come to Substack to write a post, it takes me about five minutes to find the New Post button. I go in circles from my profile to the newsletter’s homepage to the Notes feed and back. Even now, having just finished this dance, I can’t find my way back to it. This reminds me that I have no idea what I’m doing here.

The problem with starting a newsletter, I’m realizing, is that I don’t know what a newsletter is.

I think of printed small-business announcements stapled to trees in my neighborhood, of company-wide emails from the CEO telling us about the money he’s making from the work we’re doing with a winking thanks at the end. The word newsletter infers that I have something important and timely to say. And I assure you: I do not.

I consider writing more about pop culture to stay current. Timothée with Kylie’s hands in his hair at the US Open. The national embargo on Scooter Braun. Ashton and Mila’s apology video for their letters supporting (convicted rapist) Danny Masterson (yikes). Sophie, Joe, and his show of emotion (read: single tear) at the Los Angeles concert last weekend. This month is giving content and lots of it, but even though you might equate me to Perez Hilton after this paragraph, I have no idea what’s going on. To my own disappointment and yours, I’m no Hunter Harris or Allie Jones. I’m watching Chimp Empire instead of Real Housewives, and I’m not on TikTok. It’s not exactly giving current (but that kind of was, wasn’t it?).

I tell the imposter police inside of me that I don’t have to write about Chris Evans and Alba Baptista’s marriage to be relevant. That I can just WRITE, dammit! About whatever is on my mind!

And so, to your probable dismay, what I want to write about now is bangs.

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It’s almost fall and, soon, women everywhere will dress like Sally Albright and Annie Hall and never quite get it right. People will holds hands and visit bookstores. They’ll take more walks and put sweaters on their dogs. It’s almost fall, which means every single one of you will soon be wondering: Should I get bangs?

I get it. If I’ve chopped my bangs once in my adult life, I’ve done it five times. The fifth just a few weeks ago, still burned into my memory.

After weeks of begging friends to cut them for me, I woke up one Wednesday morning and, before even brushing my teeth, cut them myself.

And it was perfect. They were perfect. I was perfect.

In my delusion, I sent photos to everyone I’d talked to within 24 hours. No words, just bangs.

People said nice things because they had no choice, and I confirmed with myself that, yes, this was good.

But, only hours later, things began to unravel. I had a workout class.

As I pulled my hair into a ponytail, the triggered trauma of Bangs-Past came rushing back. Bangs hanging low into my eye, weighted with sweat, poking my cornea again and again and again. Sticky bangs slicked to my forehead. Bangs curling with moisture at my temples like a baby’s new hair.

I thought, Maybe I can hold them back with a headband, but I found that the bangs were too long to lay flat under the headband, instead sticking backwards up and out at the ends like that George Washington pool hairstyle that is still funny I don’t care what you say.

I thought about the people who have bangs. The people who are bangs. Like Zooey Deschanel and Audrey Hepburn and my mom. I envied their bang lifestyles. I googled them working out.

In solidarity, I took my headband off, accepted fate, and thought about what I’d done. How could I have been so silly, so optimistic? A 29-year-old with bangs?!

Like many of us, I’ve spent my entire conscious life consumed by this battle of bangs: to bang or not to bang?

I first publicized this internal struggle before my seventh birthday, when I did what any reasonable child who didn’t want bangs would do. I cut my bangs off. If you’re thinking, But Claire, you can’t just cut bangs off, well, you’re smarter than a fourth grader.

By cutting my bangs off, and I mean literally cutting them off—at the root—I lengthened their life span by years. Because, as you should know by now, the thing with bangs is that you can’t get rid of them. You have to wait for them to grow, slowly, into something else.

Maybe this is part of what draws us to bangs. This self-inflicted timeout. This knowledge that once that novelty wears off—that feeling of absolute power—you will be stuck with your bangs, and you will be stuck with yourself. In this era of instant gratification, maybe we crave consequences. Maybe, sometimes, we want to feel like we’re fourteen years old again, dancing hip hop at the high school talent show. That unfettered confidence followed by sickening, ripe regret. What more can we ask of something than to make us feel so squeamishly human?

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Sure, bangs are a way to reinvent yourself. To take control. To signal to the world that you’re different than who you once were, that now you have hair on your forehead. But maybe we just want to feel young again. Maybe I want to feel like George Washington when I work out in a headband. Maybe we all want to feel like that. Maybe bangs are not a sign of psychological unrest and instead the only sliver of purity, of hope, we as a society have left.

So to answer that question you’ll soon be asking—Should I get bangs?—I say yes, absolutely. Some people might instead suggest clip-in bangs or therapy, but not me. Get bangs. Live out your own Nora Ephron Fall. I know I will.