We suffer our own biases
My hair started to become grey when I was 24. A white hair here and there, not such a tragedy. It was easy to just pull them out. I didn’t give it too much importance, even if, somewhere in the back of my head, a thought started to take shape: “Oh f***k! I’m gonna get grey hair at an early age, just like my mom!”
Fast-forward 5 years, I was dying my hair reguraly – something that I hadn’t done before. 5 more years later, people started to notice the white roots and comments were arriving: “You have so much white hair already?!”; “You have so much white hair! If I wouldn’t die my hair, I would have the same”.
The next 5 years were quite heavy (emotionally) on this topic. Until one day when I took the plunge (in the Romanian language we say “mi-am luat inima în dinți” – “I took my heart in my teeth”) and decided not to dye my hair anymore. It was dyed a light brown which became blonde due to the seawater and the sun, so the difference was not so extreme. In that period I was extremely fragile emotionally due to this decision. It is funny how something so… trivial like the color of your hair can bring up soooo many feelings.
Now I am used to it being white, even if I use coloring shampoo from time to time. It gives it shades of pink or lavender, but they are never uniform. You can see that is white at its origins. The funny thing is that, since I have accepted that my hair is white and I am going to wear it as is, a lot of people compliment me for it and say that is really beautiful. I have never considered my hair beautiful, on the contrary. There are some that don’t know in which age category to fit me or that ask me if I’m retired :), but these are the exceptions.
This “perspective” was triggered by a girl that had just passed next to the bench where I was sitting, taking the Norwegian midnight sun, and said: “May I just say what beautiful hair you have and that it suits you perfectly?” We both smiled from the heart and that brought a speck of serenity in the world.
Sometimes, choosing to display our wound to the world, with no resentment or anger, just with the vulnerability of an open heart, can create wonders for ourselves and the world at large.
