Naomi

I asked my dad two questions in quick succession last week when we were watching the 10 o’clock news. “Has capitalism failed?” and “Do you think I’d look good blonde?” That pretty much sums up the opposing poles of my personality. But today I want to focus on just one of them. Let’s talk about my hair.

I’ve always thought that I’d go blonde at some point in my life. Do a lot of girls think that? I feel like it is a rite of passage of some sort, at least for pale white girls. At the same time I think I am very much a brunette at heart—in the past I’ve tinted it red and last winter I started dyeing it darker brown.

I don’t think I am a very “blonde” person—not vivacious, pretty-pretty, all the other stereotypes. I am not sure what gave me the urge to go blonde. I looked at my bedroom collage of my favourite people and none were blonde. Florence Welch made me want red hair two years ago, Audrey Horne had made me want to go darker after I spent the first half of the winter watching Twin Peaks. But there’s some hidden part of me that does feel blonde. Maybe, even though I’m always so busy hiding from the world, there’s a part of me that wants to show. I’m not sure, however, that just changing my hair colour will help.

That’s just one small part of the conversation that is all going on inside my head. I also feel like I’ll never have enough time (or energy) to express all these hugely different parts of me. Sometimes I feel like a completely different person from one week to the next, or even just from day to day. You know when you meet someone you haven’t seen in a while and your hair is greasy, you have no makeup, and you don’t feel your best? Sometimes it feels like that every day.

Do you spend your whole life as focused on who you are as when you’re a teenager? Will you one day be too busy changing nappies/washing dishes/buying cat food (if the cat-lady lifestyle is the one you choose) to give a damn about “discovering yourself”? Is it just hopelessly vapid, vain, and useless to spend so much time worrying about my hair, or my clothes? Or is that just part being a teenager and being a human being and having an identity?

Naomi’s identity issues: to be continued (possibly throughout my whole life). ♦