Turns out, going grey isn't terribly interesting. I mean, it might be if you're in to hair products and beauty regimes. But, frankly, one reason for letting the grey come through is that I don't actually enjoy spending my waking hours fussing over my hair.
It is true that I take more interest in the products I use now than I used to but that's because grey hair can easily look rubbish. The wrong cut, dry or brittle random hairs sprouting out of your head at weird angles, or just a bad case of bedhead can give the impression that you have lost it. So there is some work to do. But it's a balancing act. It's important not to let your grey hair rule your life.
So the actual process of my hair coming out of my head a different colour than I'm used to isn't fascinating. But there is a lot of inner debate going on for me and others doing this that is more important.
Obviously, there's our society's attitude to ageing. A big concern for women going grey is "will it make me look old?" I get that concern of course. So, on forums and in comments, we reassure each other that it doesn't make us look old. But there's also a bigger question - why are we so worried about looking old (or older)? Who says that being 20 or 30 is prime and anything else is the upward or downward slope? What if it's all an upward slope towards wisdom, hagdom, the proud ending of our story? After all, novels don't have the key scenes in the first third of the book and the rest is a sorry, slippery slope? They build. Why not apply the same logic to life? In which case, grey hair and ageing is a sign of progress and fulfilment of potential.
Next, there is the inner dialogue about what others will think of us. I recently cut off quite a lot of the black colour remaining so, to me, I look much greyer this week than last week. No one else has noticed because, frankly, no one else cares. Not in a bad way. It's just that my hair isn't as important to them as it is to me. They don't know every curl like I do. Anyway, since chopping off more black, I feel people will see me differently than they would have a week ago. Will strangers in the street think "she'd look a lot better if she dyed her hair?" or will they think "what a brave decision" or "what a pretty colour" or "I hope I look like that when I'm old"...?
At one level I clearly care otherwise I wouldn't having these little conversations with myself. On the other hand it's to good to know I don't care all that much. If I did I would have carried on dying it. And if I don't care that much what people think about my hair I probably don't care that much what people think of me generally. This strikes me as a good thing. Yes, I want to be considerate and respectful and kind and to empathise. But I don't want to pretzel myself in to weird shapes for other people. Turns out I'm not as pretzely as I thought I was.
And the third little conversation is about how commonly we look but don't see he person we are looking at. So many of my "Silver Sisters" have been asked whether they want to senior discount, whether they are their child's grandparent, whether they would like a seat on the bus despite being in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. No one really looked at them. They saw grey. They saw elderly. We do this all the time. We don't really see people. We glance, we assume, we judge. By the way, this is particularly unacceptable if you work in a customer facing role. You aren't just there to take the money and put it in the til. You're there to make shopping, or travelling or providing information to the public a more human experience. That should mean eye contact, a smile and a bit of good manners when it comes to how you relate to those you are serving.
Whenever you make a change, or a change happens to you, you become super-aware of that quality in others. One of your false nails fallen off? You're obsessed with other people's nails. Got a spot? You search other people's faces for blemishes better or worse than yours. And what you notice is that everyone is different, everyone has their own stuff going on. And none of it seems as bad to you as it does to them. The lesson - go easy on yourself, go easy on other people. We are all in this together!
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