My hair is blue now
on following through
author’s note: hey. been a minute. since this is a long one, i made a playlist for it. songs in order of narrative or just on theme haha anyway the world is really awful but i hope everyone’s doing as good as they can be right now. i am trying to write again (!!) and i think it’s helping me to be less insane. always a pleasant surprise when the writing comes back to me and it turns out that it was not, in fact, gone forever. sorry for overreacting. it will happen again.
“When she finishes her jokes, she climbs back into bed with me. I am facing the wall. I say, I need to change the way I live my life. She says yeah, or she says nothing. I do not remember.”
–Chloe Caldwell, Women
I just got back from sixteen days in Los Angeles, land of citrus and casual hedonism. The air is always vague with something, a kind of chemical shimmer that makes the sun flare to life. Outside, that something is smog. Inside it’s usually smoke, curling from the end of a joint or bong or vape or Sofiya’s weed pen. It wasn’t as warm as I deluded myself into thinking it would be, but I continued to delude myself with the force of my off-the-shoulder floral tops and ripped jeans and goosebumps, everywhere, all the time. At least there was sun. At least there was green and color everywhere you looked, a fruit tree or four in every yard, PALM TREES.
I went to Los Angeles because it was winter in New York and I needed to change my life. I was getting too comfortable with the four white walls of my bedroom and the perfect firmness of my flannel-clad mattress where I spent approximately two months straight, depressed and immobile, taking midday naps filled with nightmares of bathtubs overflowing and my teeth falling out that always ended with me jerking awake, sleep shirt soaked through with sweat. I was reeling after a whirlwind tryst that ended inexplicably with abandonment too abrupt to be described by a word as flippant as ghosting. Ghosting, I’d experienced before. Ghosting, I could’ve probably handled like an adult. What I could not handle was one day being wrapped in her arms as her lips took me apart on a Brooklyn sidewalk, being told that I made her feel held and strong, that she wrote me multiple letters she never sent, that she wanted me in my life for a long time, all her tenderness working so hard to convince me how much she cared to the point that I felt a deep fear grip every cell of my body at how real this felt, how solid, and the next never hearing from her again. No explanation, no reason.
I lost my mind, so I went to Los Angeles. I rang in the New Year in a new city on a new coast with my best friend, who I haven’t seen in person in over a year. The next morning, hungover and shimmering with highlighter we were too tired to wash off, we drove to the Santa Monica pier and caught the end of the sunset over the water. We took photos of each other with the ocean at our backs. A good twenty minutes passed without either of us saying a word. I can’t say what was going through her head, but I at least was reflecting on how I had not achieved anything I set out to achieve a year ago.
I had exactly two goals for 2023: finish the first draft of my novel and dye my hair blue. The latter my friend Jamie at least attempted to make happen, but my hair is SO dark and SO thick that his bedroom bleach job didn’t lift the color enough to take the blue how I wanted: bright and undeniable. I ended up with thin turquoise-green streaks throughout my head that couldn’t grow out fast enough. The former, my novel draft, languished as I wasted my valuable time and brain cells in hot pursuit of some of the most emotionally unavailable women on the planet, who often didn’t ask to be chased. I knew I was distracting myself, but I couldn’t stop. I was – probably still am – addicted to the rush, the endorphins, the euphoria of being wanted. My friends, family, nascent career… none of it was enough. None of it was anything, not without someone’s hot breath skipping and shallow in my ear, not without someone’s hand in my back pocket, not without someone’s voice exploding with warmth and joy through a voicemail they left just because they were falling asleep while driving and the moon was huge and they wanted to say hi and tell me all about it. I have been obsessed with the idea of romantic love since birth, but I don’t want to be anymore. I’ve tried so hard to find any peace or beauty within my choices, but I’m tired. I’m sitting on the shore of twenty-four years of my life looking around at the splintered wreckage and realizing I have not managed to build anything. My dogged pursuit of romantic love above all else for the past seven of those years has kept me from becoming someone I can actually live with: a better friend, a better daughter, a writer who has finished an actual book or three. And everyone around me, loving me, hating me, some complicated mix of the two, is exhausted. Something has to change.
Chalk it up to being a double Sagittarius, but I always think a new location will save me. There is no allure greater than a city where nobody knows you, where you can try on a new myth of yourself and see how it feels. For the first four days of LA, I pretended. Every day I woke up early(ish) and ate breakfast (!!) and projected to my oldest friends that I was doing great, all things considered. But standing on the beach on the first day of the new year, my brain buzzing with all the ways I’d let myself down, I felt the utter weight of my inescapable self hanging like an anchor around my neck.
In an essay I wrote when I was twenty and taking buses up and down the east coast chasing myself in women and cities that could never be mine, I said that no matter where I go, I can’t escape something that lives inside me. I am my own hurt, I must be, because how can so many places be wrong at once? I remembered this line while watching the horizon turn the most vivid indigo I’d ever seen, swallowing up the pale yellow that remained of the sun, and wanted to double over. Instead, I lowered my sunglasses and crossed my arms against the wind. It’s unconscionable that four years have gone by since I wrote it, and I’m still essentially the same. When will I stop running? When will I be brave enough to face the reality of myself, to make the changes, to do the work? Why am I so afraid to be single when my life is so full of other people who love me and one of them is standing right here?
The past few months of being alive in society have taught me that there is very little in life I can control. For the most part this scares the shit out of me and sends me into a depressive spiral ending at the conclusion that my existence is a drain on the planet’s finite resources. The only way to cope is to find things I can control and focus all parts of my brain on doing those things so it doesn’t have space left to spiral. And one thing I can control is the color of my hair. So I made an appointment with a hairstylist I met on Lex (@sabrinassillysalon on ig!) to dye my hair blue.
I have wanted to dye my hair blue since I was roughly seven years old. My mom caved and let me get two streaks, one on either side of my face, right before seventh grade. It was a bathroom box dye job. Splat brand in Aqua Rush. It smelled delicious and sweet like berries and I had to fight a violent urge to taste it. My mom helped me apply the bleach, but after a mere ten minutes of lifting (I was supposed to leave it for FORTY because my hair is BLACK), she panicked. Your beautiful hair is going to burn off! she shrieked, forcing me to wash it off before I could achieve the proper shade. The coppery yellow only allowed for a sickly green color, much worse than what I would end up with in Jamie’s bedroom over a decade later. Staring in the mirror at the butchering I’d committed upon my own visage, I vowed that someday, when my body was really mine and not just an extension of my parents, I would follow through. I would dye my entire head blue blue. Pacific ocean on a sunny morning blue. Raspberry blue. Boston sky in October blue.
The first time I brought up my idea to a friend at thirteen, she frowned, considering.
It might look weird with your skin tone, though, don’t you think? she finally said.
I stopped telling people verbally that I wanted to dye my hair blue after this. I wouldn’t be allowed to for a while, anyway, so it was kind of silly to talk about something so theoretical. I kept it between myself and my parents, who put up with my teenage angst over their bleach ban for so many years. In the meantime, I collected examples of blue-haired women in media like a crow with shiny objects.
Karou – Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
Karou is the protagonist of the young adult fantasy novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. Unlike my other influences, she’s just words on a page, but she was my first Blue Hair Icon. Because Karou was lucky enough to be in her early twenties in a universe where magic is real and not a twelve-year-old girl stuck in upstate New York, she got to make a wish for her hair to grow out of her head “pure as ultramarine straight from the paint tube.” Reading this made me ravenously jealous and horny in equal measure. Did I neglect to say Karou was also one of the defining media crushes of my youth? The fact that the book trilogy revolves around her doomed romance with a man didn’t dissuade me. She had blue hair. It was over.
I’ve been playing around with the idea that figuring out your sexuality as a femme often involves cannibalism of aesthetic, of personality. You have a best friend who you’re in love with, for example, but you don’t know that you’re in love with her, you just want to be with her all the time to the point that it drains her. When you’re ten-eleven-twelve and still trying to convince yourself that you’re straight, this question of being with her vs. being like her gets a lot of airtime. Where does the desire for the blue / desire to be with a woman really come from? Is it love or just imitation due to admiration? Or is it consumption due to jealousy, manifesting as obsession/adopting the same appearance? It’s so easy to lie to yourself. I don’t want to be with her, I just want to be like her. As if I didn’t know both could be true. I was twelve years old, a shy bookish closeted child whose best friend was the school librarian and who read anything, including young adult fantasy intended for girls several years older than I was and I didn’t want to know anything about anything complicated, even as complications crash-landed in my life. I just wanted to kiss this woman who didn’t actually exist as our blue strands mingled together, identical, indistinguishable shades – no way to tell where hers ended and mine began.
Clementine Kruczynski – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
She loves hard, she’s garrulous, she builds her entire personality around the idea/chip on her shoulder of being “too much” for people, she’s impulsive, she’s manic, she’s romantic, she’ll drive to the Charles River on a whim in the middle of the night to watch the stars from her back on the ice, she loves to feel and live things to their fullest extent, she had a bad breakup and her immediate desire was to erase that person’s entire existence from her mind, and she is proof that exposed roots look GREAT with a blue dye job, MOM. It’s like looking in a mirror.
Halsey – Instagram Post (Screenshot of Tweet posted May 27, 2015)
When I opened my Instagram Explore page at the tender age of fifteen and saw this photo, my jaw dropped. I didn’t actually know who Halsey was yet. Another few months would go by before I’d stream her blue-haired-era album Badlands (2014) and become a very specific kind of bisexual teenager. I was struck by four things, in this order:
HAIR.
CHEEKBONES.
LIPSTICK.
JONES SODA???????????
My seven-year-old ass LOVED Jones Soda. Specifically this flavor, blue bubblegum. It was so artificial and so sweet and so fizzy, it was like drinking a toddler’s dreams. I think this soda is actually where my bond to this shade of blue originates – a Pavlovian side effect. Jones used to be ubiquitous, a wide variety of highlighter flavors shining on the shelves like jewels. but as I got older the brand was harder and harder to find. Eventually the grocery store in my hometown stopped carrying them. Whenever I travel, I look for them in the soft drink aisle. If I do find them, it’s always generic flavors like cream soda and root beer, never the blue bubblegum. You can order bottles of it in bulk from the Jones website, but it’s expensive and nonessential and not at all the same as being able to walk into any big-box grocery store on your way home from the library and buy one (1) radioactive bottle of soda with an artsy black-and-white photo on the label. At the time I saw this photo, I hadn’t had a bottle of Jones Blue Bubblegum for at least five years. The juxtaposition of the bottle, her lipstick, her hair, all the perfect coordinated shade of blue, felt like a taunt. Someday, but not now, not for a long time, this could be you: dream hair, dream soda. Happy.
Ramona Flowers – Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)
You knew this was coming. Although, I do have to come clean and admit I only saw this movie for the first time four years ago. Unlike the above examples, this film and character didn’t actually impact my sense of self or sexuality in any foundational way during puberty. But of course I’d heard of Ramona Flowers. I’d seen gifsets of her on Tumblr. I knew about her seven evil exes. If you blogged in nerdy “quirky”girl circles circa 2011-13, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Ramona Flowers’ chameleon hair were inescapable. Until 2020, when I watched the film, I mainly thought of her as hair inspo. For at least a portion of the movie she had the exact hair color I wanted. No more, no less.
After the trip down memory lane, it becomes clear that the women who had inspired me bluely, whose hair I coveted and was convinced would change my life, have one more thing in common: all of them are white. My friend’s comment was giving voice to a suppressed fear I had around going blue. Maybe that specific contrast of pale and blue was the real appeal of the look. Maybe the blue wouldn’t look good against my skin.
People were always saying that kind of shit to me in high school. I was one of ten (ish) nonwhite students across all four classes, submerged in a politely racist (“liberal”) community for four years. Looking back, the one that still makes me laugh the hardest: I couldn’t be Kim Possible for Halloween because I wasn’t white.
Sometimes, though, I can get over myself. Six years ago, during my sophomore year of college, I went as Kim Possible for Halloween and totally killed. Six days ago, I sat in my colorist Sabrina’s baby pink salon chair for six hours while they bleached, toned, and finally dyed my hair the bright, electric cerulean I had wanted my entire life.
I approached the event with tentative excitement, but mostly a just have to get it out of my system energy, with the underlying suspicion that it wouldn’t turn out well. During a multi-day manic episode during my junior fall, a friend gifted me a box of navy blue hair dye “for dark hair,” which the package claimed worked fine without bleach. I was dubious but applied the dye directly to my hair anyway, and the entire time the color was sitting I thought of how powerful I would feel when I was different, when I was so obviously and visibly new. I was devastated when I washed out the dye in my dorm room shower and (no shit) I looked exactly the same. This was mainly a problem, I reasoned, of expectations. This time around, I knew better. I had looked up the colorist and knew I liked their work, it wasn’t a question of their talents, but I had emotionally prepared myself for this dye job to look awful. That way, I couldn’t be let down.
When Sabrina spun the chair around, my eyes stung with held-back tears. It was perfect.
As of today, it’ll be one week of having blue hair. The increased maintenance has taken some getting used to. I have extremely thick, straight, oily hair that I try to keep in a bob above my shoulders. Options for hairstyles are limited at this length, so I don’t face the choice paralysis I do with longer hair (space buns? ponytail? messy bun? braids? TOO MANY OPTIONS). I usually don’t even need to use conditioner in my ten-minute, boiling hot showers – once I hop out and give it a quick comb I’m ready to go. But warm water degrades the semi-permanent dye and washes it away faster. I’m a little bitch who can’t stand cold showers, but I’m committed to taking proper care of my dream hair. I’ve started washing my hair separately from my body in cold water and saturating the bleach-dry ends with conditioner. It takes longer, but there’s something restorative about slowing down and being intentional with your body in this way. I feel more connected to myself when I’m on my knees in the bathroom with my neck hanging over the rim of the tub, pressing the ice-cold showerhead into my scalp. I take care to shampoo only my roots, scrubbing harder and more precisely than before. What was once an afterthought, a chore, has now become a ritual. It feels good to try to take care of myself, to actually want to preserve a part of me. And as a result I’ve felt more rooted in my own body than I have in… maybe… forever? While I was in LA, my friend Trish dyed her hair a deep burgundy and said she felt like a whole new person to whom none of the insanity of the past few weeks had ever happened to. I understand what she meant. When I’m brushing my teeth, I can actually make eye contact with myself in the mirror. I like seeing myself this way. It feels right.
I love it.
The same day I dyed my hair, I went to a reading Chloe was a part of, my bob blown-out and blue, blue, blue. A former lover once warned me to be prepared for everyone to stare at me everywhere I went after dyeing. She’d gone the same shade of blue a few years before, another reason why I felt lucky she’d happened to me. One year after this conversation, I walked into the bar where the reading was being held and saw another girl sitting across the room with blue hair down to her waist. Nobody was looking at either of us, and I wondered if maybe it had just been that my lover lived in Boston. Over text Chloe guessed I was getting bleached tips. When she saw me her face lit up, and she doubled over laughing. Oh my god. She grabbed my shoulder. I don’t know why I didn’t expect this. Now I get it.
Outside it was below freezing. Snow was just starting to fall in tiny but determined flurries, accumulating on the sidewalk for the first time in over a year. I thought of the girl who ghosted me. I thought about letting her go. Over pho Morgan told me every lover is a mirror. We attract people with the same strengths and the same flaws and in falling out of love with them, we discover what we need to change about ourselves. The girl who ghosted me could always say the right thing, but could never back up her words with her actions. She never wrote me the letter she talked about. She never sent me her thoughts about my favorite book. I held this against her until I realized I don’t fucking do that either. I try to keep my word when dealing with other people’s hearts, but I call myself a writer and I do not write. I say I’ll have a book done by the end of the year and I avoid it for months. I say I’m taking up yoga and leave the mat unrolled on my living room floor. I say I want to learn more recipes and make the same damn pasta five days a week. I start a blog and promise to post once a month and I end up working on my September update well into January of the next calendar year. If I want to change my life, I need to change my life. If I want to be with someone who follows through, I need to become someone who follows through.
I think New Year’s resolutions are a trap, so I’m liberating myself from quantitative goals this year. I don’t want to race against myself and let myself down because I set my own arbitrary aspirational number too high over and over again. I just want to try to be more consistent overall and get shit done, one task / goal at a time, at whatever pace, but like, get it done. There’s no other way to say it: I really need to lock in.
Recently, I went back to the used bookstore in Prospect Heights where I met her. Eventually my browsing took me to the spot where I had stood that night, next to a towering stack of oversized art books at the back of the store that blocked the view of the second register. My chest tightened. In the milliseconds of darkness when I blinked, I saw us there again, back when we were each just a decision for the other to make. An idea of a person, a possibility. No words yet exchanged. No names, no care, no hurt. Just her body and mine the way they were that day, in proximity, already feeling the charge.
After the flash, though, I could only smile. That body who stood here, the one she was drawn to in the first place, was someone else who no longer exists. I know it was me, but it was still a different me, someone who didn’t value writing the way they claimed, someone who had so much time since leaving home for college to dye their hair and still wasn’t brave enough. But I can stand here and look back in time at the moment where the next several weeks of my life would emotionally derail and smile and mean it, because dyeing my hair blue might be the single thing I’ve talked most about doing my whole life and I finally did it, I fucking followed through on something and nothing can kill that joy, and because in a physical, tangible, undeniable sense, the body I live in now is no longer the one she knows, and it’s not one she’ll get to know. It’s both quietly devastating and also freeing to accept she’ll never see my blue hair in person. It helps to set a concrete marker in time, a flare on the road saying something happened here, and now it’s over, and that’s okay, that can even be good, and you will be okay after you drive past this.
On the way home from Chloe’s reading, I looked out the window at the twinkle of the receding Manhattan skyline, fuzzy through the intensifying snowfall. I missed New York. I missed the independence afforded to me by the subway, the late-night food, the busy sidewalks, the general pedestrian rights. I missed tall buildings and minimal sprawl and freezing my ass off and all my spots and my friends and my life and I was so so happy to be back. I was warm from the wine and my friends and high on the weather and my hair, my PERFECT BLUE HAIR!!!!!!!!!! and as we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge I felt a brand-new emotion. For the very first time in my entire life, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Meme corner
you look amazing <3 congrats
oml all the ways you styled your blue hair---- Top Tier