Uncomfortable Questions

What did you do when you started getting pubic hair?

I was fine initially but things got weird when I realized I had to do something to manage the growth of my recently arrived pubes. In hindsight, the odd part wasn't so much the pubes themselves. It was that I treated this ordeal like a classified secret that had international security implications.

I don't remember exactly when I got pubes. A friend who lived by my house got them first and showed them to me. So I was presumably expecting them.

But after a while, they started to grow and grow, becoming a situation I needed to take care of if I didn't want to go through the paperwork of registering my crotch as a protected national forest.

I wish I had the confidence to tell a parent or casually ask a friend: hey, what are you doing about that pubes thing?

But I couldn't do it. I was so insecure.

With peers, you pretend you were born knowing how to manage that stuff. It was way too risky to ask something that might be obvious to everyone else. That's how you get mocked. That's how you get a nickname. That's how you become "President Bush" until you graduate. No thanks.

Also, I was developing a bit later than my peers, which put me in a bind.

Either I would have to confess that I was arriving at the pube party months after everyone else (not cool). Or, they would think that my pubes had been growing non-stop for about a year without any grooming. And I had been cluelessly walking around with Jumanji in my pants (totally not cool).

And with parents, you act like puberty's not even happening. Who wants to have that conversation? No one wants to tell their mom their penis is growing clown hair. It was too mortifying to bring up.

So I was on my own.

I couldn't go to the store myself to buy something. Also, I wouldn't have known what to get. Am I supposed to shave? Trim? Wax? Use a flamethrower?

I was so shy about it, I wouldn't have been able to face the cashier or anyone else I might have encountered at the store anyway.

The worst part is we weren't googling back then. Those were still the Encarta days. Asking someone directly was the only way to learn about personal stuff. It's so much easier to figure out embarrassing stuff nowadays.

So, working with what I had at my disposal around the house, I found some scissors and used them to try to "neatly" trim my pubes. The scissors were small and not pointy, so, fortunately, I didn't stab myself in the baby factory. But it fucking took forever.

I got the job done, but it sucked.

How dumb was I that literally everyone I knew was going through the same thing, and I couldn't reach out to anyone to find a better solution? So stupid.

I wish I could go back in time and have the (hairy) balls to just ask someone.

"Hey, what do I do? What do I buy? Where do I get it?". So simple.

Not only about that, I probably had tons of other questions that I was too afraid to ask. I had to find a suboptimal solution myself and live with it.

I wonder if there's any aspect of my life today that I could fix by just asking an uncomfortable question instead of settling for a suboptimal solution. Suppose I'm still metaphorically in tiny scissor land when there are state-of-the-art solutions within reach. All I would have to do is have the courage and humility to ask.