Why I think God hates me…

A traumatic childhood filled with taunts and jokes about your giant hair will make a person a little neurotic/paranoid/obsessed with the stuff on their head.
I’m one of those people.
My mother wasn’t all that bothered with learning how to control my thick, super-curly hair and instead just let it grow REALLY long and brushed the shit out of it every day.
Basically I looked like this until I was about 13…
Yup…there’s nothing like a wardrobe consisting of hand-me-downs from the early eighties to put the finishing touches to my tragic childhood.

It’s taken me a long time to tame and develop a style for my crazy mane.
Crazy-curly thick black hair is a bit of a nightmare.
Especially when hairdressers won’t listen to you.
And it got even worse when I started dying it a couple of years ago.
It was impossible to find someone who could do my hair in the right way and I cried more tears over it than I have over anything else.
I know it sounds shallow.
But it’s not.
It’s a traumatic-childhood-issue.
If my hair looks terrible, I’m transported right back to being the poor freak-show kid getting picked on in the school yard all over again.
It’s a confidence thing, because let’s face it, people judge you by your appearence and people can be cruel.

I thought I’d found the Holy Grail in a small hairdressers in Tallaght before Christmas and I returned today, thinking I wouldn’t have a problem.
When the dye was rinsed out  and I was plonked back in front of the mirror for the cut, I glanced at my reflection.
Is that piece of hair completely white?
Holy shit, are all my highlights white!!!!?
Surely the stylist will say something…I talked to her about this so she knows the colour I was trying to achieve.
I looked at her with a horrified expression
She kept combing away.

“Uhm….they’re very…blonde, aren’t they?” I said eventually.
“Yeah,” she said.
She looked at me with a ‘what’s the problem’ expression on her face.
“Uhm…well, that wasn’t the colour we were talking about.”
She blinked at me.
“Like, last time I was here, you gave me lovely brown highlights; these are…white.”
She sighed.
“Do you want me to put some toner in to darken them?” she said, looking irritated.
Do you even have to ask that question!?

The colour turned out ok in the end.
Although as she cut my hair, she unearthed one highlight that the colourist had missed when putting the toner in.
It was still white.
She stopped.
She saw me looking.
She hesitated….and then she kept cutting.
I didn’t have the energy to argue again.
Man, I hate going to hairdressers.