The one who stayed and the one who left

During my teenage years, my hair was always dyed. Every three or four months, I would buy a box of permanent color from the Walgreens on the corner, and then at home I'd practice the subtle art of superficially changing my appearance without irreparably destroying our bath towels with stray gobs of phenylenediamine. Photos of me from the early-to-mid aughts feature my face framed by various mildly shifting hues, mostly rose-tinted browns to rust-bucket reds (red being the only color that was sufficiently exotic without violating my mom's "no unnatural colors" rule).

I stopped cold-turkey in 2006, mostly because I was too embarrassed to dye my hair in the common bathroom of my freshman dorm. Getting my hair dyed at a salon, meanwhile, seemed like an expense of Kardashian-level decadence. I was happy to rock my natural color again, a shade that my sister once affectionately called "dirt-like," and I've been rocking it ever since.

...That is, until six months ago, when I ventured back to the permanent dye aisle of CVS. In the fall, I'd impulsively asked my stylist to put highlights in my hair, and now I felt a pressing urge to cover them up (plus, I'd noticed a few sparkling gray strands worming their way through my scalp). Not looking to do anything crazy, I picked a sedate-looking shade called "mahogany brown."

As it turns out, dyeing your hair is like riding a bike. There have been zero advances in home hair-dye technology since 2006. As soon as I mixed the liquid color with the oxidizing agent, the fumigating chemical smell suffocated me like an old friend. When it was over, I discovered that my hair had come out more purplish than I'd anticipated -- sort of an eggplanty brown -- but the mild surprise I felt was also familiar. When you dye your hair at home you need to make peace with the fact that the result might be anywhere between one and one-billion shades away from what you meant to purchase. I immediately remembered the wisdom of waiting a few days for the initial shock of color to fade before drawing any conclusions.

It's a strange experience, returning to a habit you abandoned over ten years ago. Scrutinizing my auberginish head in the mirror, I felt a bit like teenage-me. At the same time, I was thinking about the class I'd be teaching the following day, idly wondering whether my present-day teenage students would notice my 'do and make assumptions about my vanity.

This also more or less reflects how I've been feeling about turning 30. My adult self is here, unambiguously and by default. Turning 30 feels as natural as finding the occasional gray hair or having opinions about the tax code; none of it is alarming. What I find more startling is how my younger selves are still capable of feeling emotionally present, too. They're immediately accessible when the right Jimmy Eat World song plays or when hair-dye ammonia burns my nostrils. By now, I kind of expected that I'd see only my adult self in the mirror, shiny and mature and smug with wisdom. But really, I still see them all.