The real reason behind my grey hair transition

I want to tell you about the first time I tried my going grey (grey hair transition). Because it did not work. And nobody really talks about the attempt that fails first.

Here is mine.

The real reason I wanted to go grey

It was never really about the colour.

My scalp had been asking for help for a long time. I was dealing with alopecia, actual bald spots that kept spreading instead of shrinking. Every time I sat down with a box of dye, I was covering the damage instead of dealing with it.

Underneath all of that was my adenomyosis. Chronic pain that asks so much from your body just to get through an ordinary day. Adding a weekly ritual of chemical dye on top of that, the smell, the sitting still, the time it took, started to feel less like taking care of myself and more like something I was doing to myself.

So the first pull toward grey was not inspiration. It was my body asking me to stop.

The first attempt

I went about it the wrong way.

I cut my hair really short, thinking a shorter cut would help me get through the transition faster. I thought if there was less dyed hair to grow out, I would reach the other side sooner.

I went about my grey hair transition the wrong way

But I did not make it there. My hair had not even fully grown out before I gave up.

The truth is I was afraid. Afraid of what people would see and what they would say while I was in the middle of it, not finished, not who I used to be and not who I was becoming either. I wanted to look a certain way. The way I thought I was supposed to look. The way I had been taught a woman my age should look.

The moment I dyed it back, my mind would not stop. It kept running through every version of what people might think. She let herself go. She is not taking care of herself. Look how much older she looks now. I was competing with an idea of beauty I never even agreed to, some invisible standard that says a woman my age is only acceptable if she looks like she has not aged at all. I was not just hiding my hair, I was hiding from a comparison that was never fair to begin with.

So I coloured my hair again, at home, by myself.

The relief that was not really relief

For a moment I felt relief. My hair looked like what people were used to seeing. It looked like what I thought people wanted to see.

But that relief was never mine. It belonged to how I imagined other people would react. It had nothing to do with how I actually felt about my own hair.

That is the part I did not understand yet. The whole thing was never about how others saw me. It was about how I felt underneath it, and I had never once asked myself that question honestly.

What changed in 2024

In 2024 I finally went all in with my grey hair transition.

This time was different because I started with a different question. Not what will people think, but what do I actually want.

I began listening to my inner voice instead of the voice in my head that kept score of everyone else’s opinion. I started praising my hair as it grew instead of bracing for what people might say about it. I stopped performing a version of myself for an audience I could not even see.

That shift was quiet. Nobody could see it happening. But it was the only reason I did not quit the second time.

Where I am now

I am still growing. My hair and everything underneath it.

But the difference between this attempt and the first one is simple. The first time I was trying to get through the grey as fast as possible so people would stop looking. This time I let myself be looked at, and I stayed anyway.

Listening to my own voice instead of that noise felt strange at first, and then it felt like coming up for air. It is not an easy thing to do, shutting out everyone else’s opinion of you. But when I actually did it, the whole process moved faster than I expected. The transition itself was still slow. Hair does not rush for anyone. But it became something beautiful instead of something I was enduring.

Somewhere in that slowness I started healing parts of myself that had nothing to do with hair at all. I began talking to my hair like it was a friend, not a problem to fix. I praised it instead of hiding it or judging it in the mirror. I made peace with the process, day by day, and somewhere along the way I actually fell in love with what I saw looking back at me.

If you are standing where I once stood, cutting your hair short hoping for a shortcut, or colouring it back the moment it feels like too much, I understand completely. I did both of those things.

Starting again after quitting is not failure. It is just the second attempt. And sometimes the second attempt is the one that actually holds.