Expression Is Survival
Hello, hair dye company Gooddyeyoung has started a blog called "Strands", for their June issue, they asked people to send in their 500 word stories about either pride month or expression is survival. There's a majority of people subscribed to my website or follow me or my podcast that don't know a lot about me or what I went through with hair dye, but to make a long story short, it's been a bumpy ride on a road to finding who I was outside of color. I wrote the piece below and submitted it, it's only about 200 words, because I couldn't write just 500 and stop, my story with expression with hair dye has been longer than what I could say in 500 words. From being fired and not hired for having colored hair, to having to wear a wig and a scarf on my head to hide it, to being ridiculed in high school up until excepting my diploma by my dean of the school, being told by family I was ugly with it and why can't I just have natural hair and always being asked by the older generation why I "need" to have "obnoxious" hair. There's a lot more I could say about this journey, but, my essay said everything I needed to get out in the shortest amount of words. Hope you guys like it.
Expression Is Survival
I couldn't put into just 500 what expression is survival means to me but to start I guess we can start off when it began, since I was a teenager I thought expression was just having bright colored hair, going against what everyone deemed "acceptable", going against the norm. I was defiant, jobs wouldn’t hire me with bright red hair, they made me wear a wig, they made me put a scarf on my head, I thought somehow I still won although it was CLEAR I was not winning in any part of this. At some point, I realized that maybe what I was doing wasn’t the only way to be creative. I'm 25 now, and I let go of the hair dye (but the hair dye won't go of me) and found expression can be more than just one thing to me. My podcast is expression, talking about things that matter to me, a community within music, creating conversation, writing blogs on my website nobody asked for, I found creativity in the people I knew around me and it inspired me like a lightning bolt hitting me. I guess when I was a teenager I thought being as "abnormal" and "alternative" as possible was my only way to express myself, but the older I get the more I find expression in the simpler things. Expression can be anything you put some or all of yourself into, and I'm glad I have found more things to put myself in. Without expression, the world would be incredibly dull, and there’s so much of someone in what they do to express themselves, it is survival in every way. Expression is never black and white, in fact, it’s quite colorful.