white hair
published: (updated: )
by Harshvardhan J. Pandit
blog health personal
There are certain indisputable signs of growing old and being mature. Every birthday brings in a new flurry of finding out the progression on these. A single white hair can disrupt years of youthfulness, acting like an anchor cast in to the soulful sea of subconsciousness. One cannot move from that point, and are doomed to forever think about the white hair until more appear.
I was quite proud of the fact that I had no white hair. I had a few, but they went away, and I like to think that this was because I had learnt not to give myself too much stress and not to worry. "... doing a PhD would change that...", I remember everyone telling me. I also remember not believing them, or wanting not to. Well, it turned out to be true, I guess.
I found out the presence of one white hair on my previous scalp the other day. It stood out in the mirror like an alien object amongst the sea of ebony familiars. I took it for granted that there were several more, hidden in plain sight, lurking beneath the seemingly nice hair, waiting to be discovered, and wanting to spring that horror of agefulness upon me.
But then, I was not truly surprised. I had, after all, been stressed out with work. This was its effect. And the kicker was that it was completely self-inflicted. And another kicker (they tend to rain down one after the other) was the effervescent feeling of not having control over it all.
Well, here we (mostly just me) are. One white hair, and I'm willing to spell the doom and apocalypse. Or maybe I can go back to not giving a fuck (except I do have to care) and to not think things (easier said than done) about work when I'm not at work. Let us see how that goes.
I'm willing to wager that this will not go down well at all. And this is being optimistic. If I was a pessimistic, I would already have decided that it cannot go down well.