I hate coloring my hair; it’s expensive, takes up a pile of time, and needs repeating a few weeks later. I hate not coloring my hair because it’s beginning to turn gray.
I kind of want it to turn into snakes so it has some purpose other than to irritate me.
I can’t decide if I want to go gray gracefully or if I want to color my hair into a rainbow swirl like follicular soft serve. My family is aware that my blonde-ish hair is 10% courtesy of the sun and 90% because of the hair dresser who talks more than I do. For the last year, I’ve brought my hair down darker and darker and now it’s close to my natural shade (I can use my son as a reference; he has the exact hair color I had before I started messing with it).
But without the blonde, I can see the grays. They are plentiful and I’m not the biggest fan. And they show up in places not unlike Rogue, right in the middle of my forehead. I could let it grow out, but there’s not enough of it in that spot to look Rogue-esque and cool so it’s straggly and slightly chaotic and this is the shit my brain diverts to while I’m reading through posts about protesting safely if you have diabetes.
Because that’s where I’m at in this moment.
Health is political. Diabetes is political. Full stop. And when opinions rain down and tell me not to talk about these things or write about these things or they can’t understand why I’d even think about these things, I wonder with misplaced envy what makes them feel so secure.
Don’t they have shit they worry about? Haven’t they ever wondered about their ability to access insulin? Are they interested in public health? Public health? Public health?
The cat scratched my face good yesterday. I was holding her near my collarbone and a noise went off, causing her to startle and drag a claw from the top of my lip to the corner of my jaw. The blood was enough to warrant a towel, pressed against my face while I reassured the kids that it was fine, no big deal. And now there’s this healing seam that splits slightly when I smile.
I hope it heals quickly. I hope it doesn’t scar.
I don’t have a lot of visible scars. There’s one on my right wrist bone from when I was little, the result of playing in a pool with a gritty concrete floor, so common in the 90s. There’s a divot on my forehead, the remnant of chicken pox in second grade. And I have a thin scar on my lower abdomen , twice incised, from where my children surgically escaped. Add in some evidence of scraped knees when I was a kid and that one scratch Loopy gave me when I had to encourage her reluctant self into the cat carrier. I’m scarred here and there in ways you can see.
Other scars are harder to identify, hard to trace the shape of.
I’m not sure how to run my finger along the edge of the concerns I have about aging with diabetes. Or the blemish left by worry about insulin supply chain issues. It’s hard to detect the scar left by this stupid disease that forces my hyper-awareness of scenarios going sideways and what my survival plan would be.
But I know those scars are there. They’re just harder to point out. Easier to see the silver strands in my hair, more of them popping up every month.
Easier to cover those, to make those go away.
