I truly, honestly love it. I may just always have blue streaks, now that I've done it. I plan to run the rinse through my hair again tonight to try to darken up the streaks a little bit. Because why not?
I am, of course, not the only person doing things to their hair during this COVID-19 social distancing period. Enough people are doing it that others are writing article about it. And this quote from an article in Allure struck me:
"Hyperfocusing on the physical can be an attempt to escape the emotional; and in the midst of a global pandemic, everyone is experiencing new, sometimes scary emotions (fear, sadness, existential dread) in new, sometimes scary ways (home, alone, with no diversions)."
Even though I do sincerely like how my hair looks with the blue streaks, I think a little bit of escape is going on here for me too. I think that putting a blue rinse through my hair and getting instant blue highlights is also helping me work through my anxiety.
I've had anxiety all my adult life -- probably all of my life, really. I've mostly dealt with it without medications, though there was a period early-ish in my career in which I had a couple of prescriptions to help me get through the day. Changing jobs eventually made the medications unnecessary, but there were many days early in my career when I would need to place a half a Xanax under my tongue just to calm down enough to be able to work.
Anxiety steals your focus and confuses your thinking. It makes monsters and creates invisible enemies. It turns your psychological distress into a perceived physical threat. You really do feel fight-or-flight, but it's your own thoughts that you need to fight or flee, so you feel trapped, causing you more distress. It's an ugly condition. And it's not simply enough to tell yourself to calm down when you're in the midst of an anxiety attack. You have to figure out how to break the cycle. Xanax can do that chemically. But when you're not taking medication, you need other ways.
For me, anxiety is a lot about control, or the lack of it. The less in control I feel, the more anxious I can become, and the faster I can slip into a cycle of anxious dread and full on anxiety attacks.
For the past more-than-a-decade, since I changed my career focus (if not subject matter), I've dealt with my anxiety with lifestyle type stuff: exercise, rigorous scheduling and planning, lists, meditation, the dog, magnesium, Disneyland (for real), wine, chocolate, mint tea, making sure I get enough sleep, setting and enforcing clear boundaries between work and home and self . . . .
That last one, the boundaries, has really been difficult to do during this quarantine time. It's important to do, but with work and home and recreation all being in the same place, the lines are difficult to draw and maintain.
So I think that, this weekend, I drew them in my hair.
The blue: It makes me feel lighter. It makes me happy. I like the way I look. Importantly: This is a thing I can control absolutely. And feeling that certainty, feeling the control, is calming. In a world where there is so little I can control right now, and in which there is so much to fear, having a little bit of control, however frivolous, is important.
And so, it's not just that blue is traditionally a color associated with calm and so my blue hair calms me. This blue is part fashion and part meditation. It is my certainty and my control. And, being that, it delivers to me inner peace.
Have a good week, friends.
