Why My Hair's Getting Blacker, and That's Not Good

This started out as a quick status update, but no, I think the existing level of confusion on this topic is enough to make it the full-length post for which someone paid...

I'm over fifty years old. Most White people who are over fifty years old have either grey hair, or hair that's been dyed some uniform and unconvincing color. The options used to be raven black, brassy yellow, or weirdly uniform brown; normally brown hair grows in a mix of shades, so when every single hair on the head is the same shade of brown, you know it's been dyed. Then there was henna, a natural plant extract that actually coats the hairs, making them look thicker and healthier, but also either a shade of red that can look very nice on some people, or else black with a greenish tone. Now the dye options include all kinds of colors in which human hair does not normally grow, which are quite popular with people my age. We know nobody's going to believe our hair ever was golden blonde or raven black. We don't want to look like some pathetic old thing trying to look younger with that almost-lifelike-but-not-quite brown dye, and we don't feel that henna suits us. Some of us feel that purple, or some other sports team color, maybe even team colors in sections, shows a sense of whimsy or irony instead of just fear of grey hair.

In my thirties I started saying I was keeping my white hair to prove the black was real. Like most mammals with black hair I have a few random white hairs that grow in and fall out, here and there; the first white hair grew down to collar length, and was noticed, when I was thirteen. At thirty I had about a dozen white hairs at the point where I part my hair. I liked them, and hoped they'd form a streak, like the white streak I admired in a friend's hair. They have yet to form even a patch of white hair. I still part my hair, when I get up in the morning and comb it, right above that potential patch of white. It's still just a highlight, because the individual hairs don't grow long enough to form even a tiny streak, but I keep hoping.

Then of course I walk out to work and the wind and humidity rearrange my hair...I never get into town with my hair looking the way it did when I left the house, and have given up fretting about it. It is not the kind of thick, heavy Real Cherokee Hair that weights itself straight down at all times. Neither is it the kind of Real African Hair that grows in coils like tiny wire springs. Though dark, it is basically European-type hair, which is relatively thin and thus absorbs humidity from the air and forms little waves. Hardly ever will any individual hair form or hold a complete ring shape; hardly ever will the hair lie down straight and flat all the way down, although when it's allowed to grow long it will weight itself down toward the ends. Very rarely will all the hairs wave in the same direction at any given time. Some White women have been able to "organize" this kind of hair, so that the little waves form one consistent shape all around the head, by wrapping their hair around rollers or applying chemicals to it. I have not. My hair is too wispy to "organize" but, when it's healthy and not split off into little tangled mats of split ends, its random waves do at least resolve, visually, into the look of thick healthy hair.

For which I am grateful...because in youth I had thin, brittle, "problem" hair that split off and fell out when it grew more than three inches long. It would have looked better if it had been chopped off short, but that was the 1960s. Boys and men had to have their hair cut short to prove they weren't potheads or homosexuals or draft dodgers, and in my parents' household, at least, girls and women had to have long hair hanging down their backs or piled up on their heads to prove the same thing. When I piled my long hair on top of my head it broke at the scalp and formed bald spots, so mostly it hung down my back and looked ratty and tatty and matty, until I was paying my own rent and cutting off my own split ends. In my twenties I didn't achieve healthy-looking hair, but at least from a distance the split ends looked like ordinary "problem hair" rather than the sort of messy rat-tail effect Dad insisted was necessary to prove I was a girl, just in case anybody failed to notice the C-cups below. (Only in a father's wildest dreams does anybody ever fail to notice C-cups on a thin female. Anyway. While living with my parents I had waist-length hair--the twenty or thirty individual hairs that lasted long enough to reach waist length.)

One of the things that changed when I went gluten-free was that I finally achieved normal-looking hair. "Problem hair" looks repulsive because it indicates ill health; it goes with little bags of saggy, sickly-looking skin around the eyes and jawline, and acne, and irregularity, and other manifestations of chronic nutrient deficiencies that visually advertise when a young person is not going to be much of an asset to a team. Around age thirty I shed all of those visual liabilities, and everyone agreed I looked much better at forty than I did at twenty. "Thick black hair," some people said enviously. Well, by White standards it was either thick or black. By Cherokee standards it never was and never will be either of those things, but I'll take what DNA has given.

Around age fifty I noticed that while the front view of my hair, which I normally see in a mirror, was still black with that tiny potential patch of white, the back side of my head was showing several random white hairs. Definitely "black lamé," if not "salt-and-pepper." And I thought, well, that's normal for a White person my age, and I am more White than Cherokee, so why not consider white hair my form of White pride. One of my younger sisters has been a henna redhead for years. I've not given any serious thought to that option; for one thing someone might think I was trying to look like her.

A funny little quirk of the DNA in my family, though, is that my White relatives' white hair tends to grow in slowly. Relatives who have Real Cherokee Hair may keep solid black hair until they're fifty or seventy or in a few cases even eighty, but when the white hair does appear, it spreads fast. I remember one of the cousins' hair showing grey in July and being almost snow-white the next time I saw him--in February. Whereas Mother and her English-and-Irish relatives tend to have salt-and-pepper instead of black, or brown instead of red, hair for thirty or forty years.

This is more thought than I usually give my hair in a day. It's there, right. I don't need to wear hats all the time, as one of my teachers told the class he did, to prevent headaches from cold or heat exhaustion from exposing his bare scalp to the weather. I give thanks for this small blessing and move on. The only hair problem I really think about fighting is "bed head," which takes about one minute per day to fix, and then once a year, on the first hot day, overgrown hair overheating my head, which takes about fifteen minutes to resolve for the rest of the year.

But this week I had some other, heavier thoughts to think about. My Significant Other had a birthday this week. One more birthday not celebrated together but we all agree that he's done all the driving in the rain God can possibly expect him to do in this lifetime. I may have some driving debts to pay, and I expect to be called to start paying them soon, but the way my eyes feel about driving is that it's not to be done for a mere birthday party.

We're baby-boomers, a generation that currently is being made to feel afraid to mention any health problems we have. On the Glyphosate Awareness page I'm the only one who ever mentions a symptom. People expect a callous, even hateful response--"Well, so what, you're getting 'old'!"

I mention this every few months because of all the confusion. There may be families where it's normal for people over age seventy, or fifty or even forty, to go home and bar the doors, declare themselves disabled, and just sit around getting sicker and more disabled for the next thirty years. I am not related to any such family.

For my elders it's normal that, after age seventy, we do notice longer recovery times after injuries and greater vulnerability to some types of infections. The Bible says "Thou shalt rise up before the white head." Seventy is when we usually acquire white heads, and it does become appropriate for younger people to protect older people from those injuries and infections, as well as defer to the reality that they have less time to finish their work in this world than other people have. Retirement is not something we do...well, people retire from one specific job or another, but people have work to do after age ninety. The usual pattern is that disability is part of a "final illness" that may last two weeks or two years. Some of my relatives have chronic disabilities, some due to injuries at birth, and work around those...but we don't do that rheumatism-and-memory-loss thing. If we have rheumatism, it's a symptom of something to be cured. Many of my elders have died before age ninety but it always seemed sudden, and as if they were far too young.

My Significant Other's family have mixed DNA. Some of them grow old the way my relatives do, and he obviously got that gene. Some of them are sickly and die young, and he's buried a lot of relatives who didn't live even forty years. There doesn't seem to be much in between. There are chronic disabilities due to injuries, of course. He's been working around a few of those for most of his life.

What we had in common, when we met, was a surprising ability to do heavy physical work and like it. We met on a construction job, restoring a fixer-upper house, working young people into the ground every day.

Well...he's had Lyme Disease. It's not a chronic disability, but it flares up into an acute disability after every glyphosate poisoning episode on his side of the mountain.

I've been working around being a celiac all my life, and nature did not intend that to be a disability at all. It's a trait, a distinction. We can't eat everything other people eat. In the process of finding this out we also find that we're stronger and hardier than most of those people are, and probably more resistant to some diseases. Who knows, maybe we'll turn out to be immune to coronavirus. In the normal course of events part of the celiac journey is saying to other people, with regretful empathy: No, unfortunately you probably will not become as healthy as we are by going gluten-free; your genes have their potential for health, longevity, looks and so on, which you should try to reach, and for you eating unsprayed, natural wheat may help you enjoy your full potential, which may or may not fall short of ours.

Unfortunately, in the United States today, wheat is almost by definition sprayed and unnatural. And a lot of people who aren't celiacs are suffering from pseudo-celiac reactions, and although going gluten-free can offer them some relief from those, the relief is only partial and temporary because there's enough glyphosate to trigger their reactions in a lot of things that aren't wheat, too.

Wednesday afternoon, I came in from work. I'd felt fine all day but suddenly I felt dead-dog tired. I kept dozing off on the bench in front of the computer in the office. I gave up, turned out the light and pulled the quilt in the office up over me, and anticipated feeling ready to get back to work after a nap. No such. As I lay down I had just a slight touch of vertigo, the illusion that the bench was on a boat. I like boats, so would I dream about summers on the Eastern Shore, or Saturday afternoon "river-cleaning" kayak rides?

Neither. Instead I had tics...not dog ticks, but muscle tics, the kind of tiny involuntary muscle spasms that sometimes cause the skin on a person's face to twitch visibly for no obvious reason. I had them from head to toe, in between and sometimes overlapping with sprints to the bathroom from the celiac reaction I also started to have. I could see the skin twitch on whatever part of the body was uncovered at any time during the next nine tedious hours. Sometimes the tics formed uncomfortable cramps during the celiac effects, and sometimes when I lay down and started to relax they jerked me awake. "Good Lord, what's this all about? It has to be a symptom of something, but what? I've not read about it being a symptom of coronavirus...I've not read about it being a symptom of cancer, either...I've not heard about it being a symptom of Norwalk Flu, although this wrung-out exhausted feeling of being faint and almost sick from weariness, after such an effort as standing up and walking from bathroom to bed, is like Norwalk Flu. What is the matter with me?"

Also I was feeling hypertensive all night. This is new for me. Everyone has felt their blood pressure rise to a point that would be called "high," but for healthy people it drops back to normal in minutes. I've learned to raise or lower my blood pressure at will, through meditation. I don't lead the kind of life that promotes the kind of cardiovascular disease that many middle-aged Americans have, but in just the past year I've noticed that during some especially bad celiac reactions, all of which have involved glyphosate poisoning, my blood pressure goes up and stays up.

I suppose the subconscious part of my mind is angry. It does know that this particular form of discomfort, and damage, and if it lasts long enough disability, is something someone else has done to me, just as if someone had broken my leg with a sledgehammer. And my conscious mind does feel that it would be good for those people, if they don't feel their own reactions to glyphosate vapors as such, if somebody did break their legs with sledgehammers. Of course I don't think people should do those things as private acts of personal revenge that start personal quarrels. They should be done formally, and publicly, as a demonstration of society's refusal to tolerate this kind of physical abuse of innocent people.

I always wonder how many two-year-old children are going through whatever I'm going through, and how many are having reactions that feel even worse. The day people who watch television realize that "weed killers," not even applied to tares in a wheat field but to crabgrass in a lawn, are what's making a toddler or baby twitch and fuss and cry all night, there is going to be a public demand for punishments of glyphosate sprayers to be carried out in a less detached, humane, official spirit than the Final Solution to Timothy McVeigh.

I did not come out to work on Thursday. I told myself, and texted to a friend, that since my job was writing fiction I could use the day to visualize a small town completely different from either of the two about which I've written other "small-town romance" fiction. Then I sat at the computer, still twitching, still emitting those awful drainpipe noises celiac reactions make, and still feeling the need to lie down and rest, all day, more or less as I'd done all night, although the pain subsided as the digestive tract emptied. Of a thirty-page novelette I wrote one page. The first page of a work of fiction is usually slow, with time out to visualize where things are in the fictional town and what sort of things the fictional characters remember and so on, but I can usually verbalize more than one page in a day.

It was a beautiful day, too. This is the eighth day in a row of extra-whippy March-type weather. The old saying is that "Sunshine and shower won't last half an hour," or "Sunshine and snow, more's to follow, we know." If the sun is shining while some sort of precipitation is falling, we can normally look forward to a sunny afternoon, then more rain or snow the next morning. But this year the mix of sun with rain, or sun with snow, or sometimes rain with snow, has not moved on in the usual way. So yesterday morning the sun and rain finally gave way to a few hours of warm sunshine...during which I went out and burned the trash and trailed switches for the cats to chase through the not-a-lawn for half an hour, and came in feeling so exhausted by this hard work that I slept for the next three hours.

My scalp itched, slightly, in the way it does when hair is falling out. I combed out, not a handful, but enough to look like the tail of an actual rat. How grey it looked in the comb. I don't usually bother looking at the back of my head in a mirror, but last night I did. How black the hair on my head looked.

White hairs are more brittle than black or red ones. White hairs break off and fall out. The hair on my head is thin and brittle, fuzzed with split ends, tatty and matty and ugly, but it is black, or at least sable...because I've been too ill, too often, to maintain that nice healthy growth of black lamé.

I thought what a disappointment this hair will be to my Significant Other, when we meet. The body shape below it, too...I'm not fat, but during these celiac episodes I puff out and look practically pregnant. In a dress the overall look can pass as merely fat, but in "fat pants," or relaxing inside with my Significant Other, no. Even when people want babies, nobody wants to look at a pregnant woman's body shape. Nature tells us to get our germs and curiosity away from her and her baby. If there's not going to be any baby? Eww. Ick.

Then I wondered whether my Significant Other worries about becoming disappointing, too, due to "old age." Well, admittedly, I do like for the other people I know to do the driving. Not always realistically, I think anybody else who can get a driver's license, however many restrictions they may have, must be a better driver than I am. I have generally avoided travelling with people who weren't. But I have to be fair. All of my elders and most of my friends have older eyes than I have, and the fact is that some of them are not better drivers. In cloudy weather, more than one friend's driving has caused me to volunteer to change seats. Grandma Bonnie Peters did most of the driving for most of the people she knew, for fifty years, with no major accidents and only one ticket, but now if we go out in a car we have to agree that it's my turn to drive. I hate the actual driving; I do not think any less of the person.

But the "old age" part? Spare me. What we are is middle-aged. What go wrong with our bodies are illnesses and injuries that people can have at any age.

I keep banging on about this because, although I've never had nonstop tics like I had on Wednesday night, before...even the tics are a regression to symptoms of, before glyphosate reaction, the gluten reactions I had continually through childhood. They weren't conspicuous or chronic. Only once, in grade four as I recall, did somebody notice one in my face and helpfully tell me that it might be a symptom of one of the chronic nutrient deficiencies all undiagnosed celiacs always have. But no, muscle spasms and the stiffness they leave behind them are not a new thing for me. When I began seriously studying neuromuscular therapy, around age thirty, I had about two-thirds of the patterns of muscle stiffness associated with a life of hard work and with all kinds of injuries I never actually had.

I see a lot of people who are showing symptoms they were not showing ten years ago. Some of them are in fact going through midlife; some of the changes in their faces are normal aging, rather than reactions to illness. Thinner, drier skin, and white hair, are normal aging. Puffy, sick-looking skin is a reaction to illness. These are two separate things, though often seen in combination. Really old faces often look beautiful; sick faces inspire pity at best.

But even though the stereotype of aging as a combination of white hair, rheumatism, and memory loss has to have some basis in the real world, and even though actual illness is more common and harder to control as people grow older...hello? If you've been told "So what? You're getting 'old'!", ask yourself since when vomiting blood has been part of the stereotype of aging. It never has; it's not part of aging. It's a reaction to an acute illness, and although a hundred years ago the illness that caused that symptom was likely to be tuberculosis or cancer, today it's more likely to be glyphosate poisoning...which the commercial media are trying so hard to tell you does not exist. So get tested for tuberculosis and cancer. Surprise! Neither of those things exists--in your body, or that of your blood-gushing relative. Push your doctor, if you go to one. Demand a test for glyphosate poisoning. Surprise! That does exist, in your body or your relative's! Demand tests of the blood in the toilet bowl during the week after the poisoning occurred, compared with tests of the blood in the same person's fingertip at times when the person's use of the toilet is normal. I guarantee that 99% of Americans who do those tests will find themselves muttering "Ber-lood! Ber-lood!" when they think of the makers and users of glyphosate. If people actually need transfusions, by all means, let's think of those reckless endangerers...and let's drain'em dry!

I don't particularly like the look of grey hair. Well, my Significant Other has it, now, after all those years with just a few random white hairs to prove the black was real. He still looks good to me. If his Cherokee hair ages the way my relatives' did, in another year he may have snow-white hair, and he'll look good to me that way too. I've never actually looked forward to seeing myself with grey hair, even in back...but when I consider the way my hair has actually grown blacker in the last few years, I want that look. I want to be healthy enough to grow visible white hairs, instead of picking clumps of white hair out of a comb every morning and shuffling into town, feeling miserable, looking sick, but showing, yes, the black hair of the particularly sickly and unttractive teenager I used to be.

Yes, of course we're getting older. Of course, if we don't die young first, we will one day be "old." In the year 2020, not being able to out-work the young people on a construction job is still something that happens to either one of us for a day or two at a time, as a symptom. If those symptoms recur often enough and keep us on the sidelines long enough, it may become normal; we may become as inactive as those young people. (That's where the rheumatic shuffle and clumsy "old" hands of the stereotype begin.) In a glyphosate-free world, however, we should be able to expect another twenty years, at least, of out-working young people, on most of the occasions when we work beside them, while flaunting our grey hair.

I want my full genetic potential lifespan of ninety-plus active years.

I want my grey hair. Which will probably stay grey, lightening barely enough to be noticed, between the ages of fifty and eighty, before it goes completely white, and even then it'll probably still show random black hairs. I don't mind matching my Significant Other, nor do I mind looking like my beautiful mother. What I mind is looking like the sickly teen-troll I was as a young undiagnosed celiac, in any way.

I want people to stop trying to pretend that symptoms I had before I was even half-grown have anything to do with normal aging. As a child I had all kinds of minor chronic symptoms of ill health because my body does not metabolize nutrients when its digestive tract is exposed to wheat gluten. As a strong healthy adult I had none of those symptoms because I stopped subjecting myself to wheat gluten. As a less healthy adult I'm having those symptoms again because other people are poisoning me with glyphosate, which affects me in the same way wheat gluten does only moreso.

And stop trying, while I'm here, to pretend that symptoms The Nephews have when some of them are barely half-grown are natural parts of a mysterious "celiac disease" that's not cured by a gluten-free diet. And stop trying to pretend that symptoms my friends' children (and grandchildren, nieces, nephews, etc.) are some other mysterious disease...clutching at straws..."He's far too young to have mononucleosis, but this gland was swollen, so maybe it's some rare form of mononucleosis. Her blood tests don't usually show any kind of anemia, but she did show iron-poor blood one day, so maybe it's some rare form of anemia." Look at the big picture! We may all have different reactions, but we're all having them at the same time...what else is going on at that time? Time after time! If doctors started testing blood samples for glyphosate every time they had a local epidemic of "flare-ups" of symptoms on the same day...we'd soon know why the chemical companies have been pouring so much money into efforts to discourage them from doing that!

I want a global ban on all sprayed poisons, whatever specific lifeform they're supposed to be "-cides" for. I want to grow old, the way nature intended my kind of humans to grow old, in a world where any fungicides or insecticides that may be necessary to protect humans or our crops are applied in non-volatile, very target-specific forms, producing no vapor drift and no reckless endangerment of other people's lives.

Just stop poisoning me, and my Significant Other, and just about everyone else we know, and then you'll see what aging looks like. Thin, translucent, brittle skin on hands that can still do whatever young people's hands do, and better than most, as long as we're careful not to break the skin. Thick white hair that glistens in the light like snow, above shoulders as straight and strong as they ever were. That's how we Highly Sensory-Perceptive types show age...as distinct from illness.