Blondie

A practice in lightening up

I can be a rather serious sort. Not in a “gloom-and-doom, everything sucks” kind of way, but more as someone who likes to think deeply about things and who usually doesn’t make a decision or take action without first considering every possible angle. I like this about myself. While I can also wander into overthinking territory - something I’m better at noticing and walking back as I get older, I like that I’m cautious and thoughtful. Sometimes it makes me feel like I can see into the future in a way others can’t. 

The flipside is that I can forget to play and to find the silliness in the smaller moments. Having two ridiculous dogs definitely helps. But it’s not an accident that my parents ironically called me their “little ray of sunshine” when I was a kid. 

My experience of being socialized as a woman is that we are to take our appearance very seriously. We are to do everything we can to be thin, and if we can’t be thin, we must show the world that we are working Really Hard to try to be thin. We should spend lots of money for many years on expensive face creams, to prevent our skin from revealing anything about the life we’ve lived. We should have long, well-maintained hair that requires way more time, effort, and money than most men could ever imagine. Performing femininity is expensive, time consuming, and a lot of work. It’s also baked in white supremacy. 

For the first few decades of my adult life, I performed as expected. I didn’t perform as well as many others, but I did my part. My hair was long or at least long-ish. I bought some face creams, I was thin. None of it felt like too much of a burden, but I’m not sure I understood enough to objectively evaluate it. 

As I came into my late 30s, I started to see all of this in a way I couldn’t when I was younger. The first thing I did was cut my hair, something I’d wanted to do for a long time. Quite short at first, and then very, very short a bit later. I hate having hair. It’s a sensory nightmare and it’s messy. It requires maintenance that I do not enjoy. I hate finding long strands of hair stuck to shower walls and scattered around the bathroom floor. I hate how it gets all over my clothes. I hate how it is a scent magnet. I hate how it used to give me a headache on long runs, even when wrapped up in a bun with two ponytail holders. I would rather spend my money on books than visits to the salon.

Coffee Pot Rock in Sedona, AZ Feb 2023

A few years after cutting my hair, I got my first tattoo. The messages I received from society about women who have tattoos were not great. But I love them and at the time I lived somewhere where it was more accepted (Colorado). It was the permission I needed to make an appointment. Like it is for so many people, getting one was a gateway. Now that I work for myself and don’t report to corporate overlords, who have narrow and white supremacist ideas about how people should present themselves, I have more tattoos than I can count. This vessel - my body - is temporary. Marking it up with images of nature and whimsical drawings makes me ridiculously happy. Nothing has made my body feel more like mine than getting tattoos. 

And thinness. While I’m still straight sized, and therefore retain most of my thin privilege, I’m not as thin as I used to be. Being in my late 40s and unable to run 50-70 miles per week (or even run at all) changes one’s body. I’ve done a lot of work to unlearn the messages I internalized about body hierarchy, and while I’ve made progress I think it’ll be something I’m always deepening my understanding of. Our cultural values of thinness are so ingrained in our collective unconscious that I continue to uncover unscrutinized thoughts and beliefs. (Side note: If this is an area where you need to expand your own unlearning, I recommend the work of Sonja Renee Taylor, Virginia Sole-Smith, and Virgie Tovar as great places to begin. Virginia Sole-Smith is particularly helpful if you are also raising small humans, as she explores the intersection of parenting and anti-fatness quite extensively.) 

But back to my hair, even though I don’t enjoy having longer hair, sometimes I get bored and try to grow it out, thinking that’s my best option to do something different. I usually end up cutting it after a few months, as even a few inches of it reminds me of how much I hate having hair. Occasionally, I’ve wanted to play with color, but relatively speaking, it is sooooo expensive to color hair as short as mine at the salon. It was a few weeks ago when it occurred to me that I could do it myself. (I struggle with the obvious sometimes. I’m not joking.) Even if it didn’t work out, my hair is so short that it would be grown out in six weeks or so and I have several shelves full of cute hats. The stakes were low. 

Although my natural hair color is a dark brown, I decided to start with blond. It’s stressful on the hair follicles to take dark brown to a light blond so this was a bold choice in more ways than one. With the help of google, I spent a Sunday afternoon doing a chemistry experiment in the spare bathroom. It was stinky and a lot of fun. It took two boxes and some toner, but for now, I’m a blond. It’s been just over a week and I’m still startled when I catch my reflection in a mirror. Which I think is good. It’s hard to articulate, but I like being reminded that I exist. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it this way as I’m already looking forward to trying a coppery red. There are so many possibilities. A healthcare provider who knows I’m neurodivergent asked when I’ll go “full neurodivergent” and try blue, purple, or pink. I’m not sure about that, but who knows where this adventure will lead. 

This little experiment reminded me of how fun it is to play, to be curious and take some low-stakes risks. While becoming a blond wasn’t an impulsive decision, as I’ve long loved platinum blond buzz cuts on women, deciding to do it myself kind of was. I’ll always be someone who looks before she leaps, but on this one weekend in January, I shortened the time between looking and leaping. I want to look for more places to play and experiment. I want to remember that my body is mine and that other people’s, and most especially society’s, expectations for how it should look are none of my concern. 

Until next time, 

Kim