in and out of hiding

when i lived in new mexico, i noticed women in every age bracket showing some white, gray, or silver hair.  i loved seeing the many ways that mother nature aged each of us differently.  i even came to love watching the changes of my own hair, like how the curly texture of the white hairs showing up in greater and greater numbers gives me the curly hair that i always wanted when i was young.

but, my recent move to the east coast has reminded me of a very different relationship between women and their hair.  a relationship so graphically captured in this recent ad that i ran into on the internet:

i have been getting grays since my 20s, and there was a time when i rushed off to the salon every 4 to 6 weeks to maintain the regime of hiding my gray.  and maybe some women truly enjoy the hours in a salon and can afford the cost, but to me, it's always just been a huge pain in the ass.  often, i thought about just stopping it all and letting my hair go natural, but there just seemed to be such a strong cultural taboo around it.  i never felt fully comfortable out of hiding when i lived on the east coast before.

then, i moved to eugene, oregon, a town where there is no norm.  if there is a norm, it's to challenge what would be normal somewhere else.  i might even venture a guess that women showing their gray were in the majority, not minority.  there were more conservative pockets of the city where i'm sure that wasn't true, but in the funky friendly street neighborhood where i lived there were tons of uncovered tresses.

so while living there, i stopped coloring.  even after moving to santa fe, new mexico, for years i enjoyed a carefree attitude about my hair.  for the first time in my adult life, i felt free of the myth that any part of my value was somehow tangled up in hair.

then, i got a professional job and moved to a more mainstream town, so little by little, i started paying more attention to how my hair looked.  after while, i started to feel as though people thought i was much older than i actually was, and this idea got so deeply ingrained in my head that i reentered the coloring cycle.  there were moments when it felt good, and i liked how it looked.  and then, there were moments when i felt ashamed looking at a picture of myself and thinking it looked so fake.  i sort-of wavered between liking it and hating it until i hit a point when it was time to just stop with the whole mess of it.

i cut my hair short and started over, and it was quite a liberation from all the hassle.  i settled back into my natural state and felt very much at home in my own hair in new mexico.  then came the move to the east coast.

my first month or two here, i felt the same comfort that i felt back in new mexico.  but then, i started to feel the stares.  my eleven year old daughter even confessed one day that she felt weird about how the other kids at one of her camps were looking at my hair.

and that made me see that the beast was still alive and well.  the great freedom of not caring was gone.  i did care, and even the reflection i started to see in the mirror changed.  as the backdrop changed to a uniformity of perfectly colored, highlighted, and styled dos, i started to feel like the awkward kid left out on prom night.

but, come on!  a part of me really knows this is a load of bs.  it's like the prevalent thoughts around me can turn into these little gnats that buzz around in my brain.  there are moments when i can mistake them for my own beliefs and feelings, but when i get clear, i remember how free from all this i can really be.

i can still feel that pesky pressure to fit in.  i always thought all that would just fall away as i got older.  instead, my experience has been that it shows up from time to time, a very pure and natural desire to connect with others that can turn into a desire to be accepted by the people around me.

but, my daughter's comment about people noticing my hair feels significant as i find my way to reconcile that desire to connect with the pressure to conform.  what do i want to teach my daughter here?  that if people think you don't fit in, you need to find some way to fit better?  

of course not.

i want to teach her to have the courage to walk her own path.  so i guess the best way to really teach my daughter to have the courage to walk her path is for me to fully take on the opportunities to honestly walk my own.