I dye my hair. Most of my hair. I shave the rest off. Well, not my eyebrows. This isn’t an essay about my grooming habbits. Although given my track record I wouldn’t rule it out entirely.
For years, I’ve been consistently pink-haired. Not every shade of pink, admittedly. There have been flirtations with magenta, bubblegum, but consitently I had HOT HOT PINK hair. Before that I shortly had post box red hair, and there was a brief period of bright orange and yellow at the begining of this hair story. But mostly, for years, I was simply the one with the pink hair.
Recently, I dyed it blue.
And I really like it. I keep forgetting it’s blue, but I really like it.
This should not be an existential event. Hair grows. Hair dye fades. Nobody from the Department of Personal Identity arrives at your house to confiscate your previous aesthetic. And yet, within days of changing it, I found myself wondering whether I was now… a Blue Person.
Not whether my hair was blue. That part was objectively true. Whether I was a Blue Person now.
The thing is…
The pink hair was never really about pink.
It started life as something closer to a Dolly Parton disguise.
Dolly Parton has spent decades understanding that people make assumptions before they ask questions. The hair. The nails. The rhinestones. They’re all part of a performance that gives people something obvious to look at, leaving the more complicated parts of her free to exist unexamined. She has said she can wander around unoticed because people aren’t looking for her. They’re looking for Dolly Parton.
My pink hair worked a little like that.
People looked at it and immediately built a story.
Creative. Friendly. Slightly chaotic. Probably owns glitter. Probably has opinions about fountain pens. Definitely not someone who takes themselves too seriously.
None of those assumptions were entirely accurate.
None of them were entirely wrong either.
But they were easier than explaining why I found eye contact complicated, or I didn’t understand the subtext of their email, why it seemed like I always wore the same clothes but actually own the same skirt three time, why I could talk for forty minutes about how there’s a purple pigment made from snail tears but forget to reply to a text message.
The hair absorbed a remarkable amount of social curiosity.
People explained me to themselves before I ever had to. People excused a lot before I even got started.
Over time, I stopped thinking of it as camouflage. It simply became me.
Or perhaps that’s what happens with any disguise worn long enough. It stops feeling like a costume and starts feeling like another layer of skin. The performance and the performer quietly negotiate until neither of them can remember who compromised first. And suddenly you own 6 shades of pink eyeliner and enough pink mascara to accidentally become commited to the aesthetic. Like some Sex and the City voice over, you find yourself explaining the feminist reclamation of the colour pink.
Then I dyed my hair blue.
And a few months later I found myself wandering around a wool festival. This should have been a straightforward experience. I knit. I like yarn. I was surrounded by hundreds of skeins of exceptionally nice yarn. The system was functioning exactly as intended. Instead, I found myself standing in front of a display of hand-dyed merino asking a question that, even as it formed, I recognised as ridiculous and needed a moment to wonder if I’d actually thought it. In between trying to work out how we would go around the hall, and make sure we saw every trader at the festival, I heard myself ask:
“Am I a Blue person now? Should I be buying blue yarn now?”
Not because I preferred it. I still liked the pink. And the green. And the black yarn with the rainbow patches, and the two colour yarn that should have been called something like “rhubarb” but had no name for the colourway. The yarn itself remained gloriously indifferent to my identity crisis. But somewhere in my brain, changing one variable had triggered a complete audit of the system.
If I was a Blue Person now, surely there should be consequences. Updated preferences. A coordinated colour palette. Perhaps a transitional period while existing possessions were phased out. Some guidance from the relevant authorities. Picasso would turn up and check what print inks I owned and set a deadline for adding more variations to my single tube of Phaltho Blue. A Blue Person PIP.
This is, I suspect, one of those moments where my neurodivergent brain quietly reveals the operating system it’s been running in the background all along.
I have an unfortunate tendency to mistake preferences for rules.
A thing I enjoy slowly becomes a thing I always choose.
A thing I always choose quietly graduates into a thing I must choose.
And before long, I’ve accidentally written myself a constitution.
Somewhere in the background Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip are shouting that the I should never define myself by the things I own.
It’s the same instinct that buys duplicate dresses because I’ve already established that this one works. The same instinct that finds a bus route that feels safe and quietly promotes it to Official Route Home. The same instinct that keeps returning to the same mug, the same café, the same playlist, because certainty is wonderfully efficient. Every decision I don’t have to remake leaves a little more energy for everything else.
Sometimes those systems are incredibly helpful. Sometimes they’re just bureaucracy. Sometimes you can’t choose the opposite because that would fundamentally mean the system does not work.
Therapy, for me, has involved learning about this.
Not dismantling every system. Not becoming endlessly spontaneous. That sounds exhausting.
Just asking a quieter question.
Is this still helping? Am I choosing this because it still fits the person I am today? Or because, somewhere along the line, a preference quietly promoted itself into policy?
The pink hair was useful. Then it became familiar. Then it became identity. Therefore blue will do the same.
Or perhaps, this time, I can let it remain simply something I happen to like.
Because there is something strangely freeing about realising identity doesn’t have to be internally consistent to be genuine.
I can have blue hair and pink yarn. I can wear black every day and own a rainbow of knitting projects.
I can love routine without mistaking it for obligation. I can change my mind without filing the appropriate paperwork.
Picasso is not the Blue Police. Dolly Parton does not always sign country.
Dear reader, I bought purple yarn.
For my true identity is rebellion…
Or, if we’re being honest, I simply allowed myself a choice without immediatly promoting it to policy.