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mail this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday 12 october 2018 50 shades of nay chapter two my two biggest fears about growing out my grey hello hello i know i know i m never here i treat this blog like a hotel i never call forgive me i won t waste time making excuses and hey i m here now and while i am you can check out how much more of my grey is showing since the last time i was here ok before we begin you should know i drafted out this post a few months ago before i d lived with the grey for any length of time and at this moment in time i don t feel quite the same unlike my roots my original feelings have been coloured by experience since then as of today 12 10 18 it s 25 weeks since i began my no dye experiment but my original thoughts which you can read below are from around the 6 12 week point but i thought they were still worth sharing in case someone reading is only just now setting off on a greying adventure and might be glad of the company welcome aboard i ll try to get around to writing an update soon and share my experiences from further down the grow out line 14 weeks without dyeing fear no 1 perhaps the the most obvious fear that i ll look older when i considered halting the sisyphean cycle of covering up my grey the idea of looking older wasn t actually my biggest concern still isn t but hey it s big enough and it s probably the most obvious so let s deal with that one first shall we all my life people have mistaken me for someone younger than my actual age when i first started working at the university supporting students in and around campus i was told that some other students on the course had asked why is that girl always hanging around with x in his classes i was 31 just this month a colleague asked if i d ever had trouble turning down students requests for me to go for a coffee with them seeing as how i was so much closer to them in age than she was i m 42 and had no idea how to break it to her and at least once in my 40s i ve been ided while buying wine maybe it s because i m small 5ft 2in size 10 or softly spoken or child free or psychologically unwilling unable to dress like a proper lady but whatever it is there s something working to embellish me with a thin veneer of youthfulness or maybe it s genetics when my dad retired from work people asked him why he was taking early retirement he wasn t he was 65 so apart from using this as an opportunity to boast joke i wanted to explain how i ve spent a lifetime correcting people s assumptions about me my age my status my experience all of which has led me here to wondering how will having grey hair change all of that 13 weeks without dyeing surely once my grey s on public display those kind of mistakes which were once frustrating but are becoming more flattering with time will cease who will i be then a grown up yeah first world problems crack out the violins right but while this all may sound privileged and indulgent i m really just trying to be honest so that anyone reading this who feels similarly knows that at least one other person out there is feeling the same trepidation i won t gloss over these concerns for fear of sounding superficial that s how women are systematically kept in place through fear of sounding frivolous childish not serious think how many things associated with traditional femininity clothes make up rom coms are also considered less worthy than masculine pastimes and it s good to recognise the purely socially constructed embarrassment that persuades us to not dare to admit we d still like to look young all while being sold products that promote that exact idea then we re tapped between either being scared of looking old and reaching for the hair dye or quietly going grey while scared of looking old when we do hence me talking about it here to contribute to the growing conversation between women experimenting with what grey means and looks like to them check out the grombre hashtag on instagram for all kinds of gorgeous greying inspiration so yes looking older is absolutely a concern of mine going grey is possibly the most ageing change in my appearance since my front teeth grew back in when i was 7 or that time in the 90s when i thought boxy jackets were a worthy style choice 13 weeks without dyeing however as i ve mentioned looking old is not the biggest fear i have not the most immediate not the one that makes looking in the mirror the hardest because first place in that race is taken by fear no 2 fear no 2 the biggest fear the fear of looking like i don t care i dare you to admit it that there s been a time when you noticed a woman with visible root regrowth of any colour not just grey and you thought to yourself hmmm has she seen herself in the mirror lately i ve thought it i m not proud of it but i have thought that kind of thing in the past i honestly try to not be judgemental about appearances at all any more but because i ve thought it i know that when a percentage of those most likely women who ll witness to my current amazing technicolor dream hair it will absolutely cross their mind that i m letting myself go that i must not care what i look like when i do oh how i really do again as with the fear of looking older the fear of sounding vain about your appearance is similarly not something we re encouraged to openly confess i know that hair makeup clothes and shoes are not everyone s priority but to a lot of us how we physically present ourselves to the world is equally a huge part of how we construct who we are for ourselves and if there wasn t some truth to the idea that many of us enjoy putting our best selves forwards then we d all only ever take just one quick selfie rather than pausing to pose for several many dozens and yet once again women young women and girls in particular are frequently vilified for caring too much about their appearance but for some it s a critical part of who we are i know there are those whose only interest in clothes begins and ends with the practicalities to fit with social convention to keep warm to keep from being arrested for indecent exposure in the cereal aisle of asda that s not me my personal style is my creativity worn on my shoulders on my feet in my ears my look is how i tell you who i am who i want to be and not just you it tells me the same things about me it creates and reinforces the person i am who i ve always been since i started picking out my outfits and attempting to dress myself at 18 months old so the idea that someone might clock my grey grow out and interpret it as evidence that i no longer care about my appearance that s aw hell that s a sharp dig in all of my soft places and i know that for however long my hair s in this untidy muddled inbetweeny neither one thing nor the other stage the risk of looking a little dishevelled will be the thing that bugs me far more than the idea of looking older older is not something i can help but looking put together like i care is something i should have control over and control could look like marching into a shop and buying a dye and mastering this unruly and ragged head of mine and yet that s not the experiment is it the experiment is seeing what this mop looks like once there s no longer a trace of dye amongst it and all my control right now is channelled into not dyeing it and fortunately while looking like i ve stopped caring is indeed my biggest fear i think maybe there s something a few things even that i can do about it a quick wardrobe restyle a haircut something anything to give the impression that i still care will hopefully do the trick if you ve seen my instagram account withjuliekirk at any point in the few months since i wrote this you ll know i definitely gave the hair chopping thing a go so there s that ray of hope and while i m growing out these silvering locks i ll take all the silver linings i can get do join in the conversation when i shared my first 50 shades of nay post all about how i tried a hair dye stripper to speed up the greying process which you can find here there were some great responses in the comments section and on my other social media too and i really enjoyed hearing your stories and thoughts on the greying process so please don t stop there are you happy to share any of your own greying fears is your biggest fear the fear of looking older or looking like you don t care or something else entirely or maybe you ve got tips on how to survive the months years it takes to finally grow it all out any advice on how to talk yourself out of ogling the packs of dye in boots like how you eye up the rotisserie chicken when you go to the supermarket before you ve eaten lunch whatever you ve got to share and wherever s easiest for you to share here insta facebook sky writing i m all ears let s keep the grey chat going julie posted by julie kirk at 14 28 2 comments labels grey hair 50 shades growing out grey hair dye going grey hair styling over 40 style grombre email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday 12 september 2018 can i have a quiet word 7 things quiet people wished you knew on quiet day hey there can i have a word today sept 12th is national quiet day a day during which we re encouraged to take a break from the over stimulation of modern life to tune out turn down and switch off and if this is about having one day a year where you can focus on listening reflecting and just being rather than speaking then hey i m all for it but what about those of us who are quiet for the remaining 364 days of the year i ve been considered and called shy and quiet all my life and along the way i ve come to understand that many louder more gregarious folks either simply don t know how to deal with us or else they d rather we change everything about our nature to suit some bubbly outgoing ideal how do i know this because they re not shy in telling us precisely that and so i m taking today s pause amid the incessant chatter as an opportunity to speak in hushed tones naturally about some of the ways in which my comrades in quiet and i are often misunderstood see how many you recognise 7 things quiet people wished you knew on quiet day 1 we re not spending all of our quiet time silently judging you i mean yeah sometimes we are obviously and never more so when you publicly point out how quiet we are see no 2 below but most of our time whether we re sitting quietly during a group conversation a meeting or at a party we re generally not silently observing you and picking apart everything you say do or are i have a friend who used to say quiet people made her nervous mainly because she didn t know what we were thinking so i guess it s not much of a leap for chatty types to fill in the blanks and decide that we re probably observing them judging them quietly plotting their downfall yet in my experience quietness more often goes hand in hand with a loud inner critic we re keenly aware that while we re perfectly happy being quiet we re somehow failing to meet the expectations of a society that insists we need to contribute join in come out of our shells make conversation our inner critics know we re expected to be able to do this thing they call small talk the worst kind of talk and a lot of talk is bad and trust me if there s anyone in that room we re judging harshly it s most likely to be ourselves so while we re quiet externally internally our inner monologues are loudly cajoling debating and assessing whether we should be trying harder at the decibel range of a hostage negotiator hollering to be heard over a thunderstorm 2 mentioning how quiet we are won t make us any louder in fact it will likely achieve the opposite it s the moment in a social gathering that quiet people dread when someone either just thinking aloud or perhaps considering themselves to be uniquely insightful comes right out and baldly states aren t you quiet if you ve done this shall i let you in on a secret it s not exactly news to us that we re not the chattiest of cathies in the room we know this and now congratulations you ve worked it out too woo hoo now what how do expect us to respond if we say a plain no we ll seem deluded because patently we are quiet if we say an embellished no such as no actually i m not all that quiet really you should hear me natter when i m with someone i actually like we ll appear rude ruder still to retaliate with and aren t you a complete gobshite but equally if we admit a plain yep but then continue on in our silence we ll appear facetious the last time this happened to me was in a tea break at a workshop where someone pointed out my lack of contributions so far and wanted to know if i was ok as well intentioned as it was it made me feel under scrutiny and for the remainder of the day the notion that i was now marked out as quiet sealed my mouth shut tighter than an introvert s smile when someone unexpectedly joins them for lunch we really can t win when you point this out about us we re backed into a conversational corner with duct tape slapped over our mouths worse still this often happens in company where there are other people s ears pricking up watching how we respond which only serves to increase our discomfort and embarrassment making relaxed natural interaction almost impossible 3 quiet people don t live in a shell that you d like us to come out of i wish i had ten minutes peace for every time someone decided i needed to come out of my shell rarely if ever in our western society do we hear it suggested of loud gregarious people that oh bless them they just need to realise how inappropriately loud they are being and go back into their shell preferably a soundproofed one this is especially hard when we re children being constantly told that we re not contributing enough particularly in school and as young adults where we re trying to find a way to be in a world that constantly asks us to go against our nature rather than consider accepting us as we are for the skills and qualities we can quietly offer at 42 i know that this quiet person s body and mind is who i am where i live it s not temporary shell like accomodation i m not moving out of it any time soon and yet imagine this i ve still managed to get through life maintain a long term relationship get jobs make friends express myself and follow my creativity who d have thought certainly not the teachers who were obsessed with me changing if your concern for us is real then you can help by not being so blunt and confrontational about our natural personality traits stop embarrassing us in front of others stop pointing out what you consider to be our weakness and if you really do care about what we have to say then offer us a safe environment in which we can do that in general though you re going to have to trust us that we re not hiding from you we ve shown you who we are many times but you keep denying it telling us we just need to be a little bit different stop trying to change us improve...
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