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On Gray Hair & “Letting Myself Go” — with a ‘How to’ List for Letting Go
“What about your hair?” she quips in a New Jersey accent that favors an ‘aw’ sound for a long a, as she hesitantly maneuvers her neon blue, sports car north, up the I-95 between New Jersey and Massachusetts. Traffic whizzes past, and a gray sky overhead mirrors the tall buildings found on the outskirts of New York City, as my aunt dubiously attempts to follow the navigation of her car’s antiquated GPS map system. Like a cloud of black smoke, her anger begins to fill the inside of the car we now sit perched within for the eight hour drive up to the Cape. Well aware that I was taking a risk in pushing her buttons, I still chose to express my opinion about how I think that people from small towns can be small minded.
Taking my statement personally, and unclear that she is feeling hurt by it — as though I am talking about her specifically — she doesn’t know how to admit this and ask for clarity. Instead, her rage, now like a venom, continues to rise and she goes on the offense. “You’re letting yourself go!” she attacks, a viper aiming for its mark. Her strike misses its intended path however because I no longer subscribe to an idea that I am an object waiting to be picked off of a shelf by some random passerby. Nor am I something to be judged based on the two-dimensionality of my appearance.
