When a woman wants to change her life, she changes her hair. Usually, this tends to mean getting bangs in addition to a shift in color. But what if you’re the wrathful, hateful type who can only see failure in mimicking the tress style of women who can best be described as, that odious term, a “manic pixie dream girl”?

To model your own hair after them would be like an admission of wanting to be like them, to possess that particular brand of carefree vacuity. The moment your locks are changed and molded into the unmistakable coif of “hipster,” you’re marked, and your chances of being looked at the same way again are forever ruined. The pictures of your transformation will always exist, waiting in the ether to be dredged up when you least expect it.

And yet, there are those unavoidable moments of yearning, when you just want to be another “cute,” “endearingly complicated” girl with bangs. Except when you get bangs, you’re going to look like a plump stuffed turkey because you don’t want to admit that your face shape just isn’t right for it–in fact your face shape is damn near trapezoidal. Still, you succumb, getting a haircut in the vein of Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary only to find that you look like Lena Dunham afterward. And so, you wear hats–many, many different types of hats. But none of it can mask what you’ve done. How you’ve tried to conform to an ideal that should fit your personality, but doesn’t. So then you try the wig route–there’s nothing permanent about it, right? It’s just insanely expensive. But it worked for Scarlett Johansson during that karaoke scene in Lost in Translation, so why shouldn’t it work for you? Then you encounter the problem of needing a plus size for your decidedly non-“cute” head proportions. Once again, all the signs damn you to a life of bangslessness. You are not–nor will you ever be–one of their sistren. You are a member of the middle part ilk; it suits your lack of belonging and contempt for others far more than Daria Morgendorffer’s semi-bangs trim.