Red Head

Dear God,

It’s official. I am insane. “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I first heard this saying in the rooms of AA. I just found out today that Albert Einstein is attributed with saying it first. The insanity of alcoholism is the alcoholic’s persistent return to alcohol in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is destroying his or her life, over and over again.

So, I don’t drink anymore but the insanity of making the same mistake over and over again still survives. What’s with me and the hair????? It seems for my whole life I have taken my emotional issues out on my hair whether it be cutting it too short or cutting the bangs to look like someone put a bowl on my head or dealing with the color. Color seems to be the most persistent hair issue in recent years.

I have played around with my hair color since I was 18 years old. It all started when my mother said, “As long as you live in my house you will never color your hair.” So, I have been coloring the hair ever since I left home at age 18. I have been red, blonde, black and every shade in between. Red seems to be my color of choice but the variations I can get on the shade of red are amazing. And it seems my compulsion with the color is all about getting it the exact perfect shade of red that exists apparently only in my mind. My father was a redhead (naturally) so I have to wonder about the Freudian implications there.

I start out thinking I just need a little depth of color added to my strawberry blonde red and the next thing I see is purple hair. Then I think a little blonde will tone down the purple and then maybe a little Oops to remove the bad color and get back to the strawberry blonde with wasn’t good enough when I started out. The irony is that this entire drug store hair coloring is meant to save me money by avoiding a trip to the hair salon but, I have to wonder after I have spent $30+ on reapplication of colors to get the hair “just right.” And, after every escapade with the hair color I say I am never going to do it again. And I do it again and again. Insanity.

So, this brings me to the question. What did you have in mind when you created me, God? Perhaps my use of hair color is a creative gene gone awry? Salvador Dali often lapsed into a semi-sleep state that helped him create bizarre images. Schiller’s imagination was stirred by the odor of rotten apples. Mark Twain and Proust got inspiration only in bed, Eugene O’Neill was addicted to drink, Edgar Allan Poe had a weakness for drugs, Somerset Maugham had a stammer and what about Walt Whitman??? So does my proclivity for hair color catastrophes indicate a truly creative me who is in a constant state of reinventing myself??

Harriet Beecher Stowe alone is sure about the source of her inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “I did not write it; God wrote it. I merely did His dictation!” That’s it, God……..You made me do it!

I’ll keep coming back!

photo by shuttershrink@flickr.com