I have shared a lot lately about my journey from leaving a Catholic school job and discovering who I am. I’m 42 years old and I am just now figuring out what kind of person I am because up until now, other people determined who I was. My voice didn’t exist and I had no boundaries.
One of my recent posts talked about some of the things I’m learning about myself. Embracing Change: Reflections on Freedom After Catholic School In it, I described the significance of blue hair. A sign of rebellion for the recent graduates of the school and for me, a sign of my freedom from the same school.
I wrote that post at the end of December and told my therapist about the idea of blue hair soon after. I didn’t think much of it after that until my session with her this week.
It was a short session because damn I felt good! There wasn’t anything I needed her help with and so I spent the time telling her all the things that were going well with me since I had last met with her. As I’ve been progressing through therapy, she has said encouraging things repeatedly. She often says she’s proud of me. I don’t like that. It makes me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. We’re working on that. But on Tuesday, after I finished raving about how I have been enforcing my boundaries and using my voice in various ways, she smiled at me and said “I love your blue hair”.
It took me a moment to understand what she said. My hair wasn’t blue. But it was. That comment felt better to me than all of the “I’m proud of you”s. Afterwards, I decided that I wanted to do something literal. I thought about actually dying a chunk of my hair blue. I don’t know how my new job feels about unnatural hair color but I know a lot of people there have very visible tattoos. And that’s when I decided to get a blue tattoo.
Remember my post about being in a John Wick movie? I Belong in a John Wick Movie Well, I’m doing it. I am getting that sleeve tattoo that I have always wanted and it’s going to be blue. I have connected with a local artist on instagram and she and I have gone back and forth with design ideas. She is going to design an array of blue flowers to go behind the heart on my arm that already exists. I told her the blue needs to be the shade of blue that teenagers dye their hair with. She doesn’t know the significance of that color yet, but when I’m in her chair on March 1st, I’ll tell her. I asked for the flowers to be kind of cascading down my arm, like hair would.
I don’t have words to accurately describe how excited this makes me. I will have that bad ass John Wick sleeve tattoo, and it’ll be blue. My former administrative assistant, now my friend, reminded me at lunch yesterday that one of the school colors is blue. I know. But this blue will mean something else to me. I can’t wait.
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