In her essay “Returning to What’s Natural”, Amelia Baxter-Stoltzfus uses semi-permanent hair dye as a metaphor for change. She talks about how semi-permanent hair dye “lets you be whoever you want without letting go of how you got there, and lets you embrace internal contradictions that make up… a complete human being.” Essentially, the author is speaking for change, stating that she thinks it is a good thing, as long as one allows past experience to continue shaping themselves long after it has occurred. The author writes about how changes are exciting, exhilarating—yet the things that most deeply make up a human being are revealed even after change. The author believes that feeling safe isn’t about setting limits on the outside, but rather it’s about hanging on to what’s inside of you, even when your surroundings change, because what’s inside of a person is always there—just like your natural hair color under a false tint.
Baxter has a good point when she speaks of change creating more depth, experience, and insight in a person. However, I think that the person on the inside is forced to change, just a little bit, with one’s surroundings and relationships. (To get metaphorical: even if hair dye is semi-permanent, the natural hair underneath always grows in darker than it did initially.) While one’s family and hometown may never change, the person going through the changes is forced to become different, because different life occurrences force a person to see things with a different, more experienced light, and change a person’s life story and experiences. The things that make us who we are exist because of what we have experienced over time—not as who we were the day we were born.
No comments:
Post a Comment