Tinted hair, untinted life

I dyed my hair brown for my birthday. That’s it, that’s the whole crime.

I was feeling low, and I wanted to try something I hadn’t done before. Something small, something for me, something to make me feel something. My mum started shouting. My dad gave an ultimatum: fix it in two days, or leave his house.

I’ve spent my whole adult life checking. What will people think, what will people think, what will people think. Rules followed. Head down. And it hasn’t been a bad life, honestly. But somewhere along the way, I noticed I’ve been living in the shadow of myself. I am not making decisions for me but because of other people. What will they say? What will they think?

Police have stopped me multiple times. Not because I was doing anything, not because I was a yahoo boy, or commited an offence but because I am a well dressed young man. And something about that still read as suspicious to somebody with a badge. So forgive me if I’m not moved when my dad calls a hair color “branding.” Branding for what? Is my job a church pulpit? Does my work depend on my hair being black? This is just ego. It’s “what will people think of me for raising a son who did this.” It’s optics, and it’s same optics couldn’t protect me from being stopped by the police.

My parents aren’t wrong that society judges you. I just don’t want to keep organising my whole life around that.

Everybody has an opinion about how you should run your own life, right up until you actually start doing so. Then it’s rebellion because I choose to make my own decisions.

Photo by Robert Clark on Unsplash

Culture, religion, the neighbour’s opinion, the aunty’s opinion, the church’s opinion. We get one life, and we spend most of it performing for an audience that isn’t even paying attention to us the way we think they are.

I’m not doing this to make anyone uncomfortable, and I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to read it that way. I’m doing it because I want to know what my own decisions feel like when nobody else’s face is in the room.

Twenty-three, and I’m done people-pleasing. Not going to lose sleep over society’s opinion of me. If I need to change my church, change who I move with, I will. Call it rebellion if you want. Maybe it is one, but I’d rather call it the first honest thing I’ve done in a while.

They can be disappointed. What I won’t do is keep shrinking myself so nobody around me ever has to feel uncomfortable.

Who cares. It’s my hair.