Honestly, I forget my hair is purple. I am cooking, bird watching, photographing the food, doing dishes, feeding birds, brushing up on my metaphysics and watching Netflix. I don't see myself. And most days my hair is in a bun because it is too thick and too hot to wear down. So I never see it. The only people who have seen it for the first few days are my housemates. No big deal to anyone. One has a blue faded to green under coat for her black hair and the other has been green, pink, blue and every natural shade imaginable. So my purple comes as no surprise.
Yesterday was the test run for semi public. I had a doctor appointment. No one in the office said anything. No nurses, billing professionals no one. I heard some tittering in the back but they speak in hushed tones when discussing billing errors anyway so it could have been that. My BP was 144 yesterday. I was a bit anxious to see if anything "bad" would happen. Nothing. None of the patients said anything either. Not to me. When the doctor walked in he asked if it was purple that last time he saw me. Nope. I explained why I did it. He laughed an said whatever makes you happy.
I've wanted punk hair since high school. And I was always so busy being a grown up that I never did anything that would interfere with the perceptive of adulthood. I got called out on a facebook posting musing about such things and the kind of prejudice that I was dealing with at work. One of my friends from school, similarly picked on like me attacked me for wanting to be like other people and believing it is okay to deface God's property. He made my hair a certain color and I should leave it that way.
Let me explain something that has gone without saying so far: God doesn't even know what color my hair should be. When I was born it was platinum. Then it was yellow blonde. Then it spent a few years being strawberry blonde. It went back to yellow blonde and stayed that way until just before dad died when it started going redder. So I dyed it a a deeper red. Kept it for about 6 years. Then when I let the red out, cut my hair short short and it gre back it grew back calico: brown, sable, streaks of black, yellow blonde sandy blonde and the dread color grey. You can see just how crazy my hair underneath is now that it is purple because I have every shade of Pantone violet to plum in my hair they make. God can't make up his mind so why does it matter what I do.
That entertained the doctor.
After that I went to the coffee shop. No one said anything. No one stared. And no one got lippy. This was not the experience I expected after some old guys down town harassed the Teenager and I about being sleeveless or goth in public.
My internal dialog went from anxious to "meh, whatever" very quickly and stayed that way. Later when the housemate and I took a walk in the sun around the neighborhood we only got two rednecks staring. So all in all I would say that the experiment is doing well. I honestly was not bothered like I used to be to the slight indifference and felt quite comfortable after the initial venture.
The next venture will be to go grocery shopping and run regular errands and maybe walk around down town and see what happens.
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