I've been looking through old photos today. Pictures of me as a kid, and more recent ones, too. It's funny, in such a short amount of time I feel so different. Pictures of me from even only a couple of years ago feel weird, and like I was a different person. I guess maybe I was. One thing about isolating myself and taking away most of the outside world is that now everything I do is truly only for myself and not anyone else. I don't think I ever realized how hard I was always trying to change myself before. I have spent almost my whole life playing dress up, to the point where I didn't even really know who I was underneath the tattoos and hair dye and random vintage clothes and just... meaningless crap. It was a costume.
Mostly I dressed up because I was bored. Profoundly bored. And I am still profoundly bored, but I guess I don't need to try so hard to change myself anymore as a way of alleviating the boredom. I've sort of embraced the boredom. I let the boredom just do its thing nowadays. I stopped fighting it.
I almost dyed my hair again. I was thinking about it. I had the dye in my shopping cart and talked to my mom about how my natural hair is so dull and has no shine and isn't even soft. So I was thinking of putting some blonde in it again, and I don't think it even is so much about how dull my natural hair is, I think I was just feeling bored. So I stopped to really examine if I actually would feel better if I were to dye my hair. I imagined the process again, with the gloves and the nasty chemical stench, and how once I do it that's it, my natural hair that I shaved my head to grow out would be lost forever again. So that's why I was looking at pictures today. Pictures of me from all kinds of years, in every hair color you can think of, and how in nearly every one of them I looked like someone else because I was addicted to change. I was constantly searching to be something that I wasn't. I didn't know how to do anything else.
I am not dyeing my hair.
I know this seems superficial, but for me it's kind of a big deal. For other reasons, too. I have spent a lot of money the past couple of weeks buying presents for people, but along the way I bought myself a bunch of stuff, too. And this is especially important because over the past year or two of my isolation I focused on my house. I was buying lots of things, but those things weren't about me, really. I was decorating and nesting and ignoring myself. But this past couple of weeks I have bought myself lots of *me* things. New clothes, and glasses, and scarves, and shoes, and things that I would only wear if I were to leave my house. It's a good sign, I think. Maybe I'm almost ready to not be isolated anymore...
