Dear internet and voluntary readers who choose visit,
Behold a more recent photo of my aging self. The lighting is nice and generous in my car so, yes, what you’re getting is a pretty much the best Golden Hour lighting that frames my face with a more youthful warm glow for the purpose of highlighting the topic I do want to talk about: gray hair.
As you can see, I’ve let go of my hair color appointments over a year ago and it’s pretty much changed my entire personal sense of self. It took a long time to merge the idea of the person I want to look like with the help of hair, makeup, clothes versus the person I actually am. TLDR: I look different, I’m older! I feel different — I feel older. But surprisingly it’s all good. This new head of hair — which is pretty effortless by the way compared to when I did color it for 3 hours at a salon every month or so — has let me rethink who I am from a personal style perspective. What’s my personal branding now? I took my life and things into an audit and not a lot survived the cut. Clothes and makeup: makeup is pretty much 5% of what it used to be and that feels great, but all of a sudden some of my clothes feel completely foreign, almost like they’re more suited to a younger version of myself and not this mid-thirties I am now. I admittedly did have a bit of panic. Who am I now? Do I look like I’m trying too hard to look young? Even the stupid-sounding, What goes with gray hair and more wrinkles?. Hahaha indeed, but it’s not so funny until it’s you with a changing body shape and face and energy and you realize oh right, I’m just a human person temporarily here living this life. I slowly got over that once the big picture settled in. I eventually settled on the optimistic view that I can choose who I want to be. My twenties are long gone now and the forties are in clearer view. Ok, so what do I do with that information?
My answer to myself is to just let it go. Be chill. I’m choosing to be more authentic and that means pretty much just accepting all the things that seemed undesirable before to me (wrinkles, gray, realistic body shape, etc). It’s too bad that there’s so much pressure out there in the world engrained in media and culture that there’s very few forms of attractive. But it’s also too bad that I let myself believe it for so long.
What has helped make this shift in thinking was cutting out tons of media. I’ve quit Instagram a long time ago (you can only find me here now or if you have my number you can find me directly). It’s a nicer and simpler existence. It’s amazing how much of what I filled my day with before has absolutely zero meaning or impact in my life. Do I miss it? Yeah. I’d be a damn liar if I didn’t enjoy the sense of attention the whole machine can give you with it’s followers, and likes, and hearts, and comments, and the promise of maybe some level of influence if only you are cool enough — and here by the way cool person can you mention my brand once and I’ll give you a dollar in return. All those games came with a specific set of anxiety that I am much happier without. Power to you if you can engage with it all and come out unscathed.
It seems that in this audit process one of the things I did enjoy and want to keep is this blog. So in addition to accepting who I am becoming I’m also choosing to sharing parts of that experience here, like I always have. Maybe no one reads it — that’s okay. I pay for the website, I choose what I write, I’m here because I want to be. Part of this whole blogging project started well over a decade ago (~2006!) and the ability to see who I was back in my early twenties and contrasting it to now has been w wild, funny, and unexpected gift. It’s all in public view too and I have benefited from it not too long ago (but don’t kid yourself it’s curated to some extent to keep a healthier distance between technology and my real life). But let’s say in a no pressure, no expectations way that maybe someone does read this, and it actually resonates with what they’re going through. From personal experience sharing with the internet as long as I have the chances are high that eventually someone may find and finds it useful in some way. Or at the very least entertaining. And that’d be cool too.
So either way. All good.