My wild-woodsy-woman hair and what it says about who I'm becoming as I get older

I'm not a witch, but fairy-tale archetypes have a place in stories about age.

Earlier this summer I decided to stop touching up my roots at home. So far I'm only gray in my temples and along my hairline, and trying to hold those grays at bay had led me to make some home hair-color missteps that had a ripple effect on the rest of my hair. Due to too-frequent dyeing, it wound up several shades lighter than my natural color and often got brassy between colorings, which led to me coloring even more often - a vicious boxed-dye cycle that I continued to perpetuate every time I felt the need to cover those telltale signs of aging at the corners of my forehead. 

So I put myself in the hands of a stylist, who's been doing a combo of highlights and lowlights every 5-6 weeks to reduce the stress on my hair and get me back to a baseline color that won’t need so much upkeep.

The result is that my hair is quite a lot darker now, and my grays aren't getting consistently covered.  

That darker shade and grayer temples have coincided with a considerably longer and, well...wilder...look. For my first two decades of adulthood I strove to always have a "style", from various choppy, chunky 'dos in the early oughts, to the pixie that defined my 30s. When I decided to grow out that pixie, I just kept letting it grow. And grow, and grow, and grow.  I haven't consciously decided I don't want a defined style; I just haven't gotten around to choosing one, so longer and wilder it continues to get. 

In a recent episode of The Mom Hour, I joked that the Instagram algorithm seems to believe that I'm a witch. I originally thought this was due to the many overlapping interests on the shared Venn diagram between myself and a storybook spell-caster: herbal medicine, cats, cottages in the woods, a love of gingerbread. But when I looked at some selfies I shot the other day, I thought: wait, am I starting to look the part, too?

It's not just the gray at my temples, which is hardly visible unless you're really looking hard (which, I admit, I usually am) but the whole picture: long, wavy, somewhat unruly hair framing a knowing smirk in a pale face that's showing more and more lines.

Capture me in the middle of the woods sipping from a toadstool-embellished mug, and the story practically writes itself. Somehow all the elements in this clip create a visual language that transforms me into something of a fairy-tale archetype. A storybook wild-woodsy-woman, if not actually a spell-casting witch.

The really weird thing was that instead of feeling dismayed by all that graying, unruly hair framing an increasingly-aging face, I feel drawn to these images. I’m fascinated, even excited, by the wild-ness and rawness of them.

"Oh, there you are!" I think when I look at this new woman in the frame, and when she smiles back at me I realize she has been here all along, just waiting to come out.

Hair is a loaded topic with a lot of layers of meaning, especially for women. Especially for women of a certain age. I still love to style mine sometimes, and I can still be a little vain about it, but there’s also something in stripping away my attachment to a certain youthful look - a trendy cut, the latest style in color treatment - that feels symbolic of all the other stripping away that’s happening in midlife.

Layer after layer I shed, slowly revealing someone brand-new…yet completely familiar.

I'm reading

Karen Walrond

‘s fantastic new book, Radiant Rebellion, which is all about aging joyfully by overthrowing some of the tired old tales we tell ourselves about what it means to get older. In it Walrond details her decision to let her hair go gray, and what it taught her about beauty standards and aging. I've also been devouring Hagitude by

Dr Sharon Blackie

which inspires women to reimagine what aging can look like by digging into the examples provided in fairy tales and myths.

Both books encourage us to write our own stories as we age, but also to look to the examples set by other women - both in our contemporary lives and in stories from the past. They’ve got me thinking quite a lot about what kind of elder I hope to become…or, am already becoming, as life and time peel away one unneeded layer after another.

I can see her so clearly in these images, the woman I'm aging into. She’s not a witch, but she is, perhaps, what has been mistaken for witchery throughout the ages: a woman coming into her own wisdom, a little bit wild but in many ways softer; solid in her sense of self, and beginning to let go of what she no longer is or never was.

Can you see her, too?

(Thanks to my dear friend Sheri for the gift of this Anthropologie mug designed by artist Nathalie Lété, and for intuiting just how perfect it is for me in this moment of my life.)