Hair today, blonde tomorrow

Hey folks, it's blog time again, but I have a feeling this won't be quite as long as the last few posts.

This isn't going to be any long discussion on my condition, or a rant or anything like that. Just a bit of a revelation that I've had today.. more specifically this evening.

Today, I decided to re-dye my hair. Sounds boring I know. And really.. it is. But the point of this post comes after the hair dyeing, so I figured I should tell the story, un-exciting as it may be.

For a while now, I've had my hair so that one half has been bleach blonde, and the other either a dark brown, or if I've not dyed my hair for a while, my natural hair colour. I like it because it's different, but to me it's not too out there. Also it looks a little like Two-Face from Batman, and being that I love Batman.. well, it's just another tick in the pros column.

Before the blonde, I'd had a multitude of colours in my hair, all just on one half. Blue, red, purple, green.. you name it. I'd dyed it all brown for my best friend's wedding last year, because I was in the wedding party, and needed to look "normal" for the photos.

So as I said today I decided to re-do the blonde side of my hair. Nothing interesting here.. aside from the result not being the way I wanted it to be. It turned out a little brassy. I wasn't sure about bleaching my hair for a second time, and I'd nearly run out of the powder that I use as part of the bleach. My other option was to dye it one of those colours I'd mentioned earlier as I had some of the tubes of colours left over from last year.

I chose the latter. And this is really where the point of this blog begins.

I dyed my hair a mixture of blue and purple, similar to how I'd had it a couple of years ago. Which, incidentally, was about 6 months after my then-wife had left me.

So about half an hour ago I was sitting here, and until that time I was happy with how it looked, I was showing my friends, and putting pictures online. Then suddenly a wave of anxiety hit me.. Initially I thought I was worried about going out in public with the "strange" hair, and more specifically going to the cricket next month with probably 50,000 people and me being the only weird one with strange hair.

I then thought maybe it was because it wasn't what I initially wanted to do with my hair, and I thought it might be quite hard to get my hair back to the way I really want it.

But, as is usually the case, it took talking about it to someone to figure out exactly what was making me feel anxious. After all, I've had my hair like this before, so it shouldn't bother me to have the same colour in my hair. I've also walked around in public with green, purple and blue hair (all at once) and not cared.

Then, I figured it out.

As I said earlier, when I initially decided to put some blue into my hair, it was just after I'd gotten my hair cut short for the first time in about 5 years, which was around about August 2010. My wife had left me in May 2010. I figured out that the cutting my hair, and to an even larger degree dyeing it a "strange" colour was, at least the way I see it now, an "I'm moving on" statement, and a time in my life where I was dealing with a lot of things changing and having to basically re-start my life.

Fast forward two and a half years later almost, to tonight, and I have moved on, and my life has become a lot more stable, and I'm very happy with how everything is going. So, dyeing my hair blue, as trivial a thing as it is,  has felt like a step backwards.

It's a strange thing, the way our minds work. Aesthetically, I think it looks really nice. It's a nice deep blue, with some purple patches as well. I like this combination of colours, and yet, it makes me uncomfortable to have my hair like this. So I've decided to dye my hair back to one colour for now.


I know this isn't the most interesting blog, after all, it's just about dyeing hair. But, the psychological side of my day interests me.. not just that my hair being a certain colour brings back feelings from a couple of years ago, but just in general.. how certain songs, smells, images, anything really, can instantly take you back to a point in your life where things were very different. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. I guess it's all part of life.. and for now, I can't have blue hair.

The weird thing is, I didn't really want to dye it this way again in the first place.. I really should listen to my instincts more.



Ok so I'm sorry if that was a bit boring. Hopefully there will be something interesting happen soon and I'll be able to write about that. This one, honestly, was more for me.