I’ve been looking at myself in the mirror a lot recently. Well, not like a lot. Just more than usual. I’ll be getting ready for my day, fixing with my hair, when I notice two things. One, wow my widow’s peak is prominent today. And two, what are those shiny silvery things mixed in with my brunette hair? Upon closer inspection, I find that I have two gray hairs, right on the top of my head.
My two silvery-gray hairs started sprouting sometime in high school. Ever since, I keep taking them out, but sure enough, they grow back in the exact same spot. The growth rate is around two or three months, and the hairs are only a few inches long.
I’ve gotten smarter about the removal process. I used to try and pull them out, but I found that my fingers are too large to properly handle my little delicacies, those two gray hairs.
I started using tweezers to separate all my other hair from that area. Then I pluck out those two silver foxes. It’s pretty painless, and for some, using the tweezers may make one feel quite fancy.
For a while, I entertained the idea of cataloguing my gray hairs in a scrapbook of sorts. After the removal process, maybe I’d place them in a ziplock bag with the date, as well as what was going on in my life at the time, to see if there was any connection between gray-hair-sproutage and stressful life events. I only actually catalogued once, so somewhere in my room at home is a bag, with two gray hairs in it, that says “Sami’s Gray Hairs, 10/12/16, sprouted during freshman year of college.”
My two gray hairs have me thinking about what I’m going to do when all my hair turns gray. First of all, when am I gonna go gray? I’ve read about people going gray early, like in their 20s. I’m turning 20 this year! So, basically, I’m going gray soon. Two hairs down, only… (Hey Siri, how many individual hairs do people have on their heads?) …99,998 hairs to go.
Secondly, what am I going to do about it? Am I gonna dye my hair? I don’t know if I can handle that. All those hair dye boxes in the grocery store kinda scare me. There are too many smiling faces, all staring at me. It’s like those portraits with the eyes that follow you wherever you move in the room. Creepy.
Alternately, will I let the gray overtake me? Will I embrace it wholeheartedly? There’s a huge culture equating femininity with physical appearance, and with that comes a disgust in female aging. I could fight back against that by accepting the gray!
If I go full-gray, would I be like Anderson Cooper? He can pull it off– I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if anyone besides Anderson Cooper can. For now, I’ll entertain the idea of going the Cooper route. But, with my curly hair (and glasses, and affinity for dramatically saying “my dear…you have…the Grimm”), I’ll probably end up looking more like Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter.
