This is a photo of a coaster my BFF L sent to me. It makes me so happy! My year of BLONDE is COMPLETE! I really can’t believe that I was able to stay blonde for an entire year! Not because being blonde in hard, but mostly because I’m terrible at finishing what I start. I’m also a master procrastinator, so I put off everything and when I do start something, I don’t finish it. But these things only apply to my own personal projects – like writing that novel, inventing that teleporter, and whitening my teeth (I mean... who can use those strips for a full week, let alone two!?). Essentially, my BLONDE year was a success because I completed it. If only everything in life were that easy.
I will admit that I regret not posting religiously on a daily basis. I guess that whole “living my life” and “having a job” thing kind of got in the way of my “vapid, superficial social experiment” known as “blonde blogging.”
The good news is that I’m going to STAY BLONDE. At least for the summer. I’m going to keep my new haircut and my spark of pink. I think that it’s fun and it’s treated me well. In the past year, my career has blossomed and I’ve met a lot of new people and made some new friends. I’ve traveled and I’ve loved and I’ve become obsessed with nail polish. I discovered that I like having my eyebrows and eyelashes professionally tended.
I think the most important thing that I’ve taken away from my BLONDE experience is my feminist awareness. I never thought that blonde hair would lead to modern feminist theory. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I guess I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps I was expecting to be treated like Marilyn, or to have men throw themselves at me, because we all know “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” The fact that I thought those things just goes to show how I’d been conditioned by our male-dominated patriarchal society. I guess I always knew that this was true, but only when I was forced to examine myself through the lens of the male gaze.
Through this experiment I have become a stronger woman. The ideals instilled in me since birth that I need a man to 1) make me whole, 2) help support me financially, 3) make me feel good about myself, and 4) lift heavy things have been completely shattered. I hate to admit to you or even myself that before my blonde year, on some level, I held all of those to be true. It’s not that I never thought about those things, it’s that I’d never addressed them or challenged them - maybe because I was weak or too self-involved with other neuroses.
Being BLONDE artificially was a choice and because of that choice, I was able to feel like I was in control of my physical appearance and how I was perceived. This made me painfully aware of how others see me – primarily men. I became somewhat obsessed with the male gaze. At first, I fell into the trap of wanting to appear pleasing and attractive to men so that my blonde ambitions could be deemed a “success,” as if being oogled by guys was my ultimate goal. Upon further inspection, I realized that I had subconsciously faltered. I then began subverting the male gaze through my wardrobe, makeup, and vernacular. I let my outer shield of propriety melt away. I said what I was thinking. I wore clothes that I was comfortable in. I wore clothes that I looked and felt good in – but not to please any man – I did it for myself. It’s a stunningly new concept for me, as I’m sure it is for other women. It’s one thing to want to look good FOR someone else than it is to want to look good for yourself.
I guess you could say that I evolved – epically. Over the course of one short year, I changed my life in a single hair color-related decision. I could call this an example of the butterfly effect, right? One small event leading to other larger events and larger consequences. I’m glad that this one small decision didn’t lead to crazy bad things like my hair falling out or losing my job. That would have been a horrible conclusion to this little experiment. I’m lucky that things have gone so well for me.
I’m not a different person, I’m just more me (despite the fact that the hair on my head is not the color that grows there naturally). It’s strange to think of yourself as not being yourself, but we all have layers and filters and walls protecting who we are… whether it’s fear or scar tissue or insulation. It is beyond cliché to think of people as being surrounded by walls and armor and fortresses, but sometimes clichés exist because they are true, right? I always vowed to never forsake who I really am (God, the sounds like an excerpt from my 8th grade diary), and realizing that you have tendencies to do so is kind of shocking.
So, in conclusion (this post is already way too long and I’m surprised you’ve kept reading this far), from this point forward, I may not always be BLONDE on the outside, but I’m going to forever have a BLONDE heart (dibs on that band name! The Blonde Hearts will be playing Pat Benatar covers in a moldy basement near you!). I honestly am surprised by the success of this whole endeavor. I guess I shouldn’t be if I knew myself at all. I knew when I embarked on this journey that things would change. After all, change was the entire basis for this experiment. Can being BLONDE change your life? Only if you want it to.
I know what you’re wondering – now that “my BLONDE year” is over, what will become of this blog? I think I’m still going to post. Now that we can all agree that my BLONDEness has transformed into MEness, I can and will use this blog to write about anything I please because I make the rules, and I think that there are no rules.
THERE ARE NO RULES.
This year gets 10 Barbie Warhols:
