When is it Time to Change Your Mind?

Those I’ve seen in the past week know I’m in my blonde era.  Kind of.  Sort of.  Circumstances made it so I couldn’t get my roots dyed for months.  (Spoiler alert: not only is my chosen hair color not found in nature, but I’ve been going gray since I was fourteen years old.  I’ve been dying my hair red for more years than I’ve been my natural medium brunette.)  It was the longest my roots have been since the pandemic, and I was surprised by how much of my hair was gray.  My entire part (no matter whether it is a center part, side part, or somewhere-in-between part).  All around my face.  Spots in the back of my head.   Until this point, I steadfastly believed that I was too young to have gray hair and that the only way to deal with it was to dye it.  But I started to wonder if there was a different way to manage the abrupt line delineating the end of my roots and the beginning of my ruby red. 

It may be time to change my mind about my gray hair.  I’d been managing it for almost 30 years by dyeing it, but I started to like the idea of the gray transitioning gracefully into the non-gray parts of my hair.  And it’s not that dyeing my hair wasn’t working.  I loved spending time with my hair guy (Hi Kyle! I love Bea Rose Salon!), and my husband pointed out that “having red hair is kind of ‘your thing.’”  But instead of reflexively getting my roots done, I started to maybe, possibly consider changing my mind.  What is that in motivational interviewing?  Is there a stage between pre-contemplation and contemplation?  I moved quickly into the contemplation stage when I talked to some of my (all male, bless them) colleagues one morning. One of them, a ginger with a beard full of gray, said that instead of the “salt and pepper” men of a certain age are described as having, his look is distinctly “cinnamon sugar.”  Besides being a delightful description of red hair with a sprinkle of gray, it reframed my thinking.  Instead of giving up my red hair, I was getting my cinnamon sugar hair.  It always feels better to move towards something you want than away from something you don’t.  

I texted Kyle a couple of days before my appointment to let him know that what we’d been doing for (literally) ten years may be changing. I wanted him to have a game plan because if he didn’t, the friction to change my mind would be too great, and I’d stay with what had been working. Our brains love routine: the more things we have on autopilot, the more space we have to think about (potentially dangerous) things that require decision making.  And having a trusted guide is nice when we change our minds.  Case in point: I recently changed my mind about how awful an eight-hour drive can be (read about it here).  My trusted guide there?  Apple Maps via Siri.   

Kyle and I discussed strategies.  I showed him my vision on Pinterest.  He gently pointed out that I’d pinned AI-generated images that were impossible to create without using more dye than required just to keep my hair red.  Good to know.  Do not use AI as your trusted guide when changing your mind.  But then, wise as he is, Kyle said, “I mean, if you don’t like it, we’ll just change it back.”  I can change my mind?  And then I can change it back?  Revolutionary.  Nobody will come at me and give me a hard time, demanding an explanation of why I changed my hair and then do it again if I change it back?  Probably not, and if so, is it even that big of a deal?  That’s when I realized I was keeping my hair decisions on autopilot because I was worried about how much negative attention I’d attract by doing something different.  I was concerned about introducing friction into my life.  It’s not rational to believe that my life is so unstable that the discomfort of saying, “I changed my hair because I’m going gray.  And if I don’t like it, I will just change it back,” would upset the delicate balance and spin me into, what, admission to a psychiatric hospital?   

But there’s also something more profound that’s hard to admit: I don’t change my mind unless completely necessary because I worry it will make me look like I don’t know what I’m doing.  In the PICU, I have to look like I know what I’m doing, even when the data is imperfect and the time is dangerously limited.  I am proud of my skill in making necessary decisions with the information I have and managing the repercussions of my choices if they occur.  (Those repercussions usually don’t happen, by the way.  What is it Mark Twain supposedly said?  “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”)  Being sure of our decisions is necessary as physicians, but (for me, anyway) even more so as a woman.  Women who change their minds get branded as airheads, flaky, flighty, or overly emotional.  Heaven forbid I’m seen as an overly emotional airhead.  Never mind that there are much worse ways to be described, but it bothers me because I’m worried there’s a kernel of truth to it.  If I’m described as something obviously false, for instance, the woman with the unsightly face tattoo, it won’t impact my self-image because it doesn’t even register.  I can’t be the woman with an unsightly face tattoo because I don’t even have a face tattoo.  Something that’s not so obvious, though?  “Oof, she can’t commit to a hair color; where else is she not thinking clearly?”  Ouch.  Talk about a hit to the ego.  

I’m not ready to change my mind about generally never changing my mind.  But it’s a worthy exercise to change my mind every once in a while to build data for myself that nothing bad will happen if I loosen my grip on a previous decision I’ve made.  One way to go gray, it turns out, is to lighten the hair so that the gray blends more easily.  Hence, my blonde-ish era.  There is still some red in the blonde, so I am getting a glimpse of cinnamon sugar.  Right now, I really think I like it.  But tomorrow, who knows?  I can always change my mind.