I don’t remember who introduced me to Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals email. Each week a prompt from a well-known writer is featured. This week the prompt comes from Elizabeth Benedict:
Hair is elemental. It can define us, confine us, refine us, and when we’re faced with losing it, through age or illness, it can undo us.
Write about your relationship to your hair: how it shapes your own self-image. How others see you. Or how, when you lost your hair or changed it, you learned something—about yourself or someone else.
Elizabeth Benedict, Isolation Journal #186
I started letting my hair go grey a few years ago. I had gotten to a point where I could color my hair and within just a few short weeks, the white strands around my temple reappeared. All my life I have told myself I wanted white hair like my grandmother. But when it came time to stop fighting the change, I wasn’t sure how. I decided to go cold turkey and totally stop coloring my hair.
My hair is pretty much all grey and white now, but I don’t see it that way. To me, it still looks blonde in the mirror. I am shocked by photos of me that show such stark white.
People in general compliment my hair color. Who knew that so many like grey hair? Google grey hair and you get an article from Glamour titled “Oyster-Gray Hair is the Coolest New Color Trend.”
My stylist recommended a purple shampoo to use once a week. At Christmas a friend “complimented” the lavender in my hair. As if it was purple on purpose. Yikes! So I cut back on the purple shampoo.
I think most women have a love/hate relationship with their hair. I grow it out then cut it short. Go all one length, then layers. But most of all I am grateful for my hair. I finally look like my dear grandma, Nene.
What is your relationship with your hair?
Reflections on the Teche 