How Dying My Hair Brown Made Me Fear The Future, Part I

Apparently some people were actually reading this and were disappointed when I stopped updating. Traveling this summer and moving back into the dorms, coupled with an internship and a full 18 credit semester, has left me with little time to bitch and pontificate. Time passed and shit happened. More on this later. For now, I would like to explain how dying my hair brown last Saturday made me extremely fearful of the future.

I've wanted to be a redhead since I was a kid. I always talked about coloring my hair but never did it because I used to grow out & donate my hair to nonprofits that make wigs out of them. Don't judge my hobbies-- it beats model trains and fantasy football. Some sick kids out there now have 12-17 inches of my flexible head growths. Anyway, I finally decided to just cave and color my hair. Originally I was gonna do it in a salon, then I got talked into doing it at home, then I got talked into doing it in a salon again. Last Saturday I came with the photos I've been pining over for the last few years (my tastes in shades of red have changed since the teenygoth days of yesteryear) and went to the lady who usually makes my hair look so damn good.

I left with brown hair.

Not intentionally-- and, mind, it was a different shade of brown. Somewhere a wire had been crossed that turned copper red to a not at all red kind of brown. The roots were reddish and, only seeing that, I left without realizing that all the hair behind my head was only about one shade off. It wasn't until I got home and inspected it in the mirror and normal, non-trendy salon lighting that I realized it was not at all red on 90% of my head.

People complimented it every day since, since it's still a nice shade of brown, but it's not red. It's not RED so it's not what I wanted, and no amount of being a nice shade of brown has yet been able to quell my disappointment. It's like finally getting the courage to jump out of the plane with your parachute to find you're only ten feet off the ground. You land on your feet and everyone claps a little, but it is just not the same damn thing as terminal velocity.

I rescheduled for tomorrow to have it re-done, but now I'm plagued by insecurities. This red was one of the first steps in my transition from a stressed student to someone who I was determined would be more relaxed, more accepting of her situation. I was going to stop fearing the what-ifs, stop sweating the extra efforts, and start doing the things that made me feel good. I started eating better, packing lunches and snacks so I didn't go hungry all day during class (a bad habit I've had since middle school). I stopped impulse shopping. I threw out much of my lazy clothes. I decided not to go to grad school right now, not to take the GREs. I convinced myself not to panic when I ran out of time and couldn't complete an assignment. I made the appointments to dye my hair red and get that tattoo.

The most immediate of these things has gone wrong. And not horribly wrong, because it's fixable, but many of these others are not. If dying my hair was a mistake, what else was a mistake? What about all the things I threw away? What about grad school? What about a freaking tattoo?