It Seems So Quiet...

::sigh::  Alerts are still down.  Bummer.  I'll have alot of catching up to do.  If you visit here and have posted, Please leave your link so I can stop by.  I haven't put any journal links in my sidebars, but I will now.  If you'd like my to add yours, just leave a comment. :)  Just so that I can get there from here when AOL is AWOL.  ;(~

   Being in this community has really become an integral part of my days.  It seems kind of odd to open only a few e-mails instead of 20 or so.  I miss you guys.  I've been visiting the blogs page and trying to open some tabs with partial journal addresses, so I'm not completely out of touch. 

   I'd like to thank everyone who has visited and commented.  I can't express how much it's meant to me-all the encouragement.  I was very nervous about starting this journal.  Thought maybe it was just TMI for a public forum(is that what you'd call journals?)  But then, I figured out that if I'm going to change my attitudes about who I am, build up a feeling that I can be part of the world as more than I have felt worthy of, I have to "confess" my feelings to others.  It has to be more than just writing on pages that noone else will ever read, more than hidden secrets.  It isn't going to mean much if I write to myself that I wish there were more people in the world that would look beyond the physicalities to the person inside.  I already know that, and it's just not as effective to say to myself that "I know" that I am worth so much more than my looks.  I let what I envision as my appearance to others color my self-worth.  And yes, I do know intellectually that I shouldn't do that, but telling my inner insecurities that, is a whole different story.

   An example:  I have silver hair.  In my family you either go premature gray or bald.  Thankfully, I got the gray.  I found my first gray hairs at the age of 16, spent the next 25 years depending on those little brown bottles of fantasy hair. 

   As my husband required more and more care, and I became more tired, and hopeless, I got more and more careless about my looks.  I couldn't see the point of going through the routine when noone else cared how I looked.  So why should I?  We hardly ever went out in public and when we did, the attention was all on Mike.  I just sat quietly in the background and waited for him to need something.

   But then, when I was about 50% silver, a clerk at the drivethru asked me where I got my hair frosted.  They thought I had paid to have this done to my hair on purpose-imagine that.  Shortly after that, I took my son for  his haircut, and the stylist commented on how lucky I was to have that shade, instead of the ugly battleship gray color.  She gave me some silver treatment shampoo to enhance the color even more.  So I did take care of it a little more than I had before. 

   Now, years later, I'm about 80% silver, and worried about it making me look older.  I still get occasional comments on how nice it looks, and have no intentions of going back to the bottles.  But, in a world obsessed with youth, it's just one more thing that labels me "less than".  I want the world to look at me as someone who can be authentic enough to show off my "true colors".  Silver hair, wrinkles from the sun and all!  There are other things that I'm self-conscious about, but I'll save them for another entry.  This one's long enough for now.

   Let's hope that alerts are back on soon.  I'm going through some withdrawals here. 

                                                               <3  Leigh