Every morning of my childhood, for as long as I could remember, I would run up to my mother with a long comb and a spray bottle full of water. She would wet my hair until I could feel the tiny droplets dripping down my temples, and then part it in two or three short strokes, always in the same spot. Then, while it was still damp, she would pick up an oversized aerosol can and thoroughly douse my head in a gallon of megahold hairspray until my hair turned into virtual stone. I spent most of my adolescence with the shiny, immovable hair of a pin-striped eighties stockbroker. In almost every picture of me as a child, it’s almost impossible to tell I had ginger hair at all, because it was covered in so much product, it looked like the color of wet clay, and had the stiffness of titanium. And it soon became part of my public identity. Classmates would gather around me on the playground during recess and take turns knocking on my hair like they were knocking on a slab of concrete. On weekends, the local blacksmith would come to our house and use my hair to forge wrought iron into various decorative metal fixtures. And I once won a battering contest against a very formidable ram.

Of course, as with any well-publicized strength, vulnerabilities were right around the corner. And my enemies knew this well.

My brother, who is six years older than I am, had plenty of time to reckon with his hair journey long before I came along. A true child of the nineties, he was far more adventurous with using hair as a form of expressing inner angst, and cycled through countless iterations of spikes, colored tips, and bleaches, including a brief foray into pink hair dye that nearly tore our family apart. (He insisted on dying his head the color of chewed bubble gum. Mom and Dad insisted that any such action was akin to joining one of those cults where you have to drown a kitten to get in. He did it anyway. My parents had to kill a cat just to prove their point.)

Now, many years later, he’s given up on taming his hair entirely, opting instead for a shaggy, unkempt mop and an unwieldy beard. He looks very much like the kind of person who goes hunting for game with his bare hands and has bitten directly into a still-beating deer heart. In many ways, the disparity in our hair choices is emblematic of the differences we exhibited more broadly: he preferred the more rebellious, Hot Topic–inspired way of life, and I preferred the more genteel lifestyle of a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman. To say we did not particularly mesh would be an understatement. And yet, I insisted on being included in whatever activities he partook in, per my contractual duties as younger sibling.