The blonde deceit

Don’t believe it. Don’t go down that road, peroxide bottle in hand and hope in your heart. I’ve been blonde for less than a week and I can tell you it’s not true—blondes do not have more fun.

 

Perhaps I was expecting my life to change overnight. I got my hair cut early last week. My stylist loved the haircut and asked me to be a “model” for a new hair color that they were going to use at the salon. I got seduced by the lure of being able to say I was a model. Her salon colleague would make my hair platinum blonde to accentuate the new edgy haircut and I wouldn’t have to pay for it because he was demonstrating the color techniques to the other stylists. Why not, I thought. Just do me.

 

The deed was done. I’m a blonde, not exactly platinum but more of a brassy, orangey blonde, like one of those little rubber troll dolls with the long synthetic hair. Sadly, it’s not synthetic—it’s attached to my head. And it's almost buzz-cut short, but actually I like the simplicity of the buzz-cut short. It used to be my hair. I feel like an alien is inhabiting my body—a blonde alien who looks like an aged Annie Lennox in one of those animated Internet ads that shows what aging does to a woman. I’m the one who makes you shudder, the ridiculous one who should be using the anti-aging product.

 

I’ll live with it. Really, some very kind people have said they like it. I said I’d rather be edgy than be a total nerd. It may have been a mistake to say that aloud. I’ll live with it as long as it takes my roots to grow and then it’s back to nerdy old me, but with a very short edgy haircut.

 

But here’s the thing: while I’m trying to adjust to my abnormal hair color, feeling like I’ve gone to Poland for the winter while some trashy blonde inhabits my body, I’m experiencing an intense loneliness. It seems like everyone in the known universe is paired up with someone else; everyone has someone to hold them on a cold night when the wind is howling. Everyone but me. The drastic hair change did not change my life one iota—if anything, it became worse.

 

Yes, this is my attempt to be wacky and overly dramatic, exaggerating a silly hair situation that is not important in the grand scheme of things. The hair will grow out and I’ll be comfortable in my own saggy skin again. But, most likely, I will still be lonely. I have been praying about this and feeling guilty. Shouldn’t God be enough for me? Am I failing Him because I can’t easily slip past this human longing? I should be so filled with the Lord that I don’t need it. Is it a weakness? I don’t know. I want to say that God is enough, that His grace is sufficient for me. I feel like I am betraying Him because all that He has given me—life, salvation, the comfort of His unending presence—sometimes doesn’t seem like enough.

 

This blonde is having a hard time. And this would probably be happening to me, blonde or not blonde. It’s not much fun.