Last week, or maybe longer – time has been a bit of a blur recently – I was writing about my mental health episode. This week, I’m writing about my hair. These two things don’t seem entirely related, but they actually are.

Why is dyeing your hair a drastically different colour a hallmark of a mental health episode? I’m pretty sure, for me, that should be a diagnostic criterion and definitely a red flag (Or a blue one).

Except I’m not sat here with drastically different hair. It’s brown. It started brown and ended up brown, and this boring colour doesn’t really show the utter chaos I’ve been through with it this last week. It’s really on brand for me that I can’t even dye my hair without chaos.

The whole thing ended up feeling like a perfect metaphor for my mental health lately. On the surface, not much looked different. From the outside, I was still me. But underneath, there was a lot going on that nobody could really see. Layers of old things resurfacing, patches that refused to cooperate, unexpected reactions, and a growing temptation to just throw more chemicals at the problem and hope for the best.

So, this story is about to get hairy.

The BRILLIANT Idea

I wrote last time that I bought hair dye. It felt like a BRILLIANT idea at the time. I have been rather impulsive lately, and dyeing my hair usually helps. It needed doing anyway.

The last time I dyed my hair it created this weird red brown band through the middle section of my hair. At first this made absolutely no sense to me. I only put the dye on the mids and ends right at the end after waiting for the roots to develop. I know how to avoid hot roots, but I never knew hot mids were a thing.

Then I realised my hair isn’t actually one thing anymore.

The bottom half grew during a long eating disorder relapse. It’s thinner, drier and generally a bit worse for wear. The top half is newer hair. Recovery hair. Thick, dense hair. Hair grown from eating more, eating enough protein, taking vitamin D, fish oil, and apparently consuming enough nutritional yeast that I’m constantly surprised I haven’t turned into a glowing life form like Mr Burns in The Simpsons. “I bring you love”.

I quite literally have two different versions of myself growing out of my head. Once I realised that, the strange band made a bit more sense. Different hair behaves differently.

I knew I needed to use a colour remover and try to even everything out before dyeing it again. The ends despite also giving myself an impulsive 4 inch chop also had years of colour build up, and I knew a drastically different shade wasn’t going to take very well over the top of that. So I bought ColourB4 and I also bought Cosmic Blue hair dye.

I’ve worked hard in recovery to become more myself, and strangely enough, clothes and hair have been part of that. I stopped hiding in black and slowly found my way towards navy, cream and brown. Those colours feel like me in a way black never really did.

Lately, though, I’ve let a lot of that slide.

The plan was simple. Use the ColourB4. Dye my hair Cosmic Blue. Reconnect with myself. Maybe feel a little more like the person I’ve been struggling to find again over the last few weeks.

Simple, right? It was NOT simple.

The Absolutely TERRIBLE Idea

The ColourB4 went fine. It turned my hair into a muddy brown orange mess, which meant it had done exactly what it was supposed to do. This isn’t my first rodeo with ColourB4, so I wasn’t remotely concerned. I waited 48 hours and applied the Cosmic Blue dye.

At first, I loved it. It was exactly the navy colour I wanted. However, it was also night time, and I know better than to trust hair colour under artificial lighting.

When I woke up I immediately inspected my hair in the mirror. The roots and mids were VERY navy. My ends were so black I was worried Anish Kapoor would sue me for unauthorised use of Vantablack. Light particles entered the ends of my hair and only 0.04% of them returned. Somehow there were even green and brown streaks running through it.

OH NO. No. No, no, no.

I stood staring at myself in the mirror, hoping that if I blinked enough times it would somehow become normal hair. It did not.

To say I panicked would be an understatement. In a mixed episode, the distance between “this is annoying” and “EVERYTHING IS RUINED FOREVER” is approximately three seconds. One minute I was looking at my hair. The next I was crying and catastrophising.

Nothing ever goes right.

I can’t deal with any of this anymore.

I just wanted to feel good about something. ANYTHING.

An emptiness washed over me. This just won’t do. I need to fix my hair THIS MINUTE.

So, in a mess of tears and agitation, I got dressed, shoved a hat over my hair disaster and power-walked to Boots, hoping I had hidden my shame sufficiently beneath a woolly disguise.

I grabbed another box of ColourB4 and, completely defeated, abandoned the Cosmic Blue dream. Instead, I picked up a semi-permanent boring brown dye. I had simply had enough.

I didn’t want the muddy orange mess the ColourB4 left me with for two days. I didn’t want whatever was currently happening on my head. I didn’t want Gen Z pop-star roots and black hole like ends.

I just wanted hair I could wear outside without a hat.

The cashier was the same one who had served me when I originally bought the ColourB4 and Cosmic Blue. She looked at the box. She looked at me. Then she gave me a knowing smile and a little nod. No words were exchanged. None were needed.

I rushed straight back home to fix this utter mess because it seems I can’t even dye my hair without drama or chaos. This was supposed to help me. It was supposed to be self care.

Instead, it had become yet another thing that felt broken, and right then I was struggling to believe I could fix any of it.

The Fix

At home, I immediately put the ColourB4 back on my hair. I had dyed it the night before and knew this was risky, but I didn’t care anymore. I just needed it to be fixed. Surely the answer to a chemical disaster is adding even more chemicals. At least that’s what Breaking Bad taught me.

Thankfully, it worked brilliantly and removed nearly all of the blue and black. I then immediately put the boring brown semi-permanent dye on top and, for once, something actually went according to plan.

The side effects, however, were much less pleasant.

My scalp felt – and still feels – like I’ve got really bad sunburn. It’s somehow both sore and too tight for my skull at the same time. The smell of all these chemicals triggered cluster attacks for most of the week, and to make matters worse, the conditioner that came with the brown dye smelled like I’d voluntarily shoved my entire face into a bowl of Zoflora soaked pot pourri. I probably smell like an over enthusiastic TikTok cleaning page.

There wasn’t much I could do about that. My hair and scalp probably wouldn’t have survived another wash.

My hands and forearms were also red, tight and sore from repeatedly washing them despite wearing gloves. By this point I had decided that if I ever saw hair dye again it would be too soon.

Despite this declaration, I bleached and dyed my son’s hair pearlescent pink the very next day thankfully with no chaos. I feel that says quite a lot about how much I love him. But after that, I REALLY never wanted to see hair dye again.

Standing in front of the mirror looking at my now brown hair, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I had somehow gone from brown hair to brown hair. Not navy. Not blue. Not dramatically transformed. Brown.

This entire side quest to Cosmic Blue had turned into some sort of Spaghetti Junction nightmare level detour before depositing me exactly where I started. The more I thought about it, the more it began to feel like a metaphor for my mental health lately.

The Struggle is Completely Invisible.

When I walk down the street, absolutely no one is going to look at my hair and think:

“Wow, I bet it took a lot of work, struggle and chaos to get that colour.”

It’s a boring, mundane, natural looking brown. It was not Maybelline, I could have in fact been born with it.

No one would look at it and know it took multiple rounds of colour remover, several headaches, a painful scalp and a week of obsessing over it. They just see the end result. It’s what has been happening with me lately.

Eating disorder? I’m currently struggling a lot with recovery.

Mental health? I’ve been all over the place, spending most of my time agitated, anxious, not sleeping and unable to settle.

Physical health? I injured my hip badly enough that I could barely walk properly for a while and had to stop doing the minimal activity and strength training that usually helps me. I injured it while obsessively cleaning, twice. I’ve also been dealing with cluster headaches and shadows.

Yet when I walk down the street, none of that is visible. I look a normal weight. I look healthy. Sometimes I probably even look happy because I’m smiling at cashiers and strangers. From the outside, I look fine.

What people don’t see are the many sleepless nights I’ve spent crying.

They don’t see that for the last two weeks the first thing I’ve eaten most days has been around 6pm because my appetite has disappeared into the void and I’m doing precisely nothing about it.

They don’t see me jumping from anxiety to anxiety, turning minor worries into catastrophes because in those moments I lose touch with logic and perspective. Everything feels urgent. Everything feels like a disaster. I know it isn’t, but knowing that and feeling that are two very different things.

They don’t see how hard I’ve been finding it just to get through the day. They don’t see any of it.

In the exact same way nobody would look at my hair and think:

“Wow, she must have worked hard to get that colour.”

Appearances can be very deceptive and it’s one of the reasons I blog.

Sometimes it can be nice to hide the struggle. Sometimes I would rather be the smiling woman walking down the street with boring brown hair than the person crying at 3am because her brain won’t let her rest. Or the person explaining why I was crying.

But something gets lost when we only show the polished smiling version of ourselves.

This story is just as much a part of me as the smiling version. The anxious version, the struggling version, the exhausted version, the version obsessively applying colour remover to a hair dye disaster while smelling like an overenthusiastic TikTok cleaning page.

I know people often prefer these parts of life to stay hidden. I understand why. They’re messy, uncomfortable and difficult. But I also think this is what being human looks like. Life often comes with the side effect of struggle.

The funny thing is that I started this whole adventure because I was trying to help myself. I wanted to feel more like me again. I wanted navy hair. Instead I ended up with a sore scalp, cluster headaches, multiple existential crises, and exactly the same colour hair I started with. Brown.

But maybe that’s the point. Nobody can see the journey it took to get here. They just see whats in front of them.

And sometimes that’s true of people too.

The song for this post, Snowflakes by Just Jack. For currently feeling like I’m looking through a pane of glass at my own life.