This Is About My Gray Hair
I was in 8th grade when a classmate first pointed out that I had a gray hair.
My classmate thought it was bizarre, so she made it a point to try to show other people, which was the last thing you would want when you’re in 8th grade. That was back in the day when I had the long wavy, Justin Bieber hairstyle.
My hair was one of my points of pride. Deep down, I think I wanted my hair to be a statement of who I was. At that confusing age, it seems like we’re all searching for something external to cling onto as a source of identity. We’re trying to be “cool”, or at least “normal” whatever those mean.
Between 8th grade and 10th grade, I maintained the long hair. For the most part, the long hair made it more difficult to see my gray hairs (or that’s what I thought), but I noticed what was happening: the population of my gray hairs was growing. So I tried to control it.
Periodically, I’d go to the bathroom in my home with a pair of scissors and pinpoint my gray hairs one by one and snip. Cutting them wouldn’t get rid of them completely, but it would conceal them. I don’t know how many hours I spent doing this over the course of these few years, but in any case, it was more hours than what was necessary: 0.
I feel for Past Jake. I wish I could go back and tell him to stop, that it doesn’t matter as much as he thought it did. Would Past Me have even listened though? I’m not so sure.
Between senior year of high school through freshman, probably even sophomore year in college, I took a new, smarter approach to concealing my gray hairs. Cutting them one by one took too long, especially when they still seemed to be multiplying, showing up most prominently on the sides of my temples (at this time I had switched to a shorter hairstyle — how I have it today). My new approach was buying a Just For Men Autostop product for $8 at Meijer. It allowed me to easily comb in hair coloring product that would match my hair color and cover the gray. Eventually, the coloring product starts to fade, so I repeated this process every 3 or 4 months.
I liked the results it provided, but I felt so much shame in doing this. At Meijer, I would wait for the aisle to be empty before going to grab the box and then zoom to the self-checkout, so no one would see. If someone else walked to the aisle, I would pretend I was looking at the nearby shaving products.
I didn’t know why my hair was gray. Was it genetic? Was it environmental? Was it stress-induced as so many people wanting to play doctor would suggest — “Are you stressed? You need to relax” was the common diagnosis and prescription. Or was it something else I was doing that was affecting this? All I knew was it felt wrong. An 18-year-old isn’t supposed to have this much gray hair.
Some people, friends, would and still do talk me up, telling me that it looks cool, that it was manly and was a manifestation of my wisdom, or that they wish they had gray hair too. It was flattering but I never bought into what they were saying. I was too busy thinking that the gray hair was making me unattractive to the girls I was interested in.
I don’t know how or when exactly it came about, but it probably had to do with all the personal development books and podcasts and the conversations of faith I was having that finally made things click for me. I eventually stopped dying my hair, leaving it as is and gradually became okay with who I was. I wish I had more I could share about this important personal change, but I just don’t remember much more.
(tangent: but props to Felicia, who I met after I had stopped the hair-dying and who on our third date asked me what my biggest physical insecurity was and when I told her my gray hair, she said that she liked it and that it was endearing. For some reason, I actually believed her when she said this too.)
Here’s what I can share. It hasn’t just been my gray hairs that have made me insecure or feel shame unnecessarily. I also have super hairy legs, which again, during high school I actually tried trimming the hairs of in order to look less like a sasquatch. I have big, hairy moles at random parts of my body, most notably a few on my arms. I’ve had an odd bump on my back since at least high school too. I’ve had it checked by a doctor to make sure it’s not anything dangerous. It’s a cyst. It isn’t painful or cancerous so I never had it removed. There’s also the convergence of my two eyebrows to become a unibrow. Why do almost all these have to do with hair? This one I think goes back to 4th or 5th grade when I started noticing it. I didn’t want to be the kid with the unibrow. I would’ve gotten made fun of so hard. Instead, I shaped up my eyebrows with a shaving razor to keep it from getting out of control. Unlike most the others, this is one I still worry about sometimes. I’m still trying to become okay with who I am physically, emotionally, spiritually.
If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you might be able to relate a little bit. Who couldn’t? We all have something about ourselves we want to hide. For some people, it’s their jiggly arms that they don’t like. For others, it’s their nose, or their slightly crooked teeth, or their forehead wrinkles. The emotional, the invisible is just as bad because we can hide those things.
Either way, we try things, we try anything that we think might temporarily fix the problem or reduce the pain. The issue is we just have to keep doing these temporary fixes over and over, and it’s all a charade, it’s all external. None of it is truly addressing the root cause. If only we could see how foolish we look from all that we do to avoid becoming okay with who we really are.
Here’s what I’ve learned from this journey, and how I’m finding more peace with my “abnormalities” in the past few years.
I ask: who says an 22-year-old isn’t supposed to have this much gray hair? Is it media? Instagram? Other humans? Is it the world?
What about God? What’s his take on this? God created us, he created me in his image and after doing so, called us very good. He loves me exactly where I am. No matter what.
So it seems the world makes us feel ugly. God makes us feel eternally beautiful and beloved…if we listen to him.
And he also made us to belong to each other because we are better together. We are not here to criticize one another or to compare ourselves. So when we stop doing those things and stop focusing on how ugly we think we are, we can spend that time and energy on giving generously and loving others. But we can’t do that if we’re focused on ourselves.
There’s a line in scripture that says we are so valuable that God has counted and keeps track of every hair on our heads (Luke 12:7). That means God knows about my gray hairs and he hasn’t stopped loving me because of them.
It’s not an easy thing to instantly start believing for ourselves when we’ve gone so long without believing it. I find what Henri Nouwen wrote comforting…he said:
“If people knew us as we really are, without all the worldly decorations we have gathered, would they still love us? Or would they forget us as soon as we were no longer of use to them? This is the central question of identity: Are we good because of what we do or have, or because of who we are? Am I somebody because the world makes me into somebody, or am I somebody because I belonged to God long before I belonged to the world?”
The book Beautiful Mercy also offers some good words:
“We need to remember that the wounds we have received didn’t come about overnight, and the healing won’t take place overnight either. It takes time, perseverance, and determination.”
Pray with me:
Lord Jesus, thank you for making me in your image and calling me good and loving me no matter what. Help me to remember all this when I’m feeling discouraged by all the lies the world is telling me.
