Well, kids, it’s today. Why I Dyed My Hair Purple and Other Unorthodox Stories is here. This project has been in the works for about three years now, and I’m truly blessed to have reached this milestone.
I’d like to think the fine folks at Calla Press Publishing, my friends at The Habit Membership, my church family, my launch team, and the wide array of individuals who have encouraged me throughout the process.
I’ll stop there before the orchestra plays me offstage.
Some of you have read the book already for review purposes. However, those who haven’t are likely plagued by one over-arching question.
Why did I dye my hair purple?
Why indeed.
The title essay gets into the answer pretty in-depth, and I obviously don’t want to ruin too much of it for you. But I also think you deserve at least a taste of the explanation.
Think of this post as a teaser trailer for the title essay of the book. So, now that you’ve settled down in your seat with some popcorn, let me start by giving you a visual.
Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.
When I show people this picture, they usually tell me I look pretty awesome or some derivative of that. Really, I continued dyeing my hair for several years after the initial incident, so there’s a part of me that felt that way too.
But when I look at this picture, I mainly just feel sad. As cool as I might appear, all I can see is what I was like on the inside.
And on the inside, I was dying.
I was spiritually emaciated, confused, and angry—the consequences of legalistic religion, faulty doctrine, and feeling demeaned by people who seemed more interested in conforming me to their expectations than understanding who I actually am.
I wrote about this a little last week and also spoke about it on an interview with Amy Simon at The Purposeful Pen Podcast, so I’m not going to do too much rehashing of that chapter of my church-going history.
But I’ll briefly summarize it like this: legalism kills.
Just ask the Apostle Paul.
From the Cross, the Lord Jesus Christ declared, “It is finished.” According to Paul, to add anything at all to that finished work is the height of blasphemy. As he wrote to the Galatians, who had some pretty serious problems in this area, “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose” (Gal. 2:21).
When we declare that a person must do anything other than believe on the Lord Jesus Christ in order to be saved, we say that the sacrifice He made on our behalf means nothing.
Not only that, but we make demands of people that lead to death, not life; to slavery, not freedom.
I was living in a church culture that, whether people were conscious of it or not, implied that due to my entertainment preferences, writing projects, mental health struggles, and other factors, I was not really a Christian.
On a few occasions, people explicitly said this.
As I wrote last week, I believe that the individuals I was dealing with are genuine believers, many of whom may honestly have been unaware that they were hurting me. But at the time, I felt rejected, belittled, and not good enough.
Not good enough for them, and by extension, certainly not good enough for God.
So, I decided that if they were unwilling to see me for who I actually was, I would do something to make them see.
Hence, the purple hair.
I was tired of being diminished and told that I needed to be a version of myself that, for many reasons, was impossible.
After we finally left the church that caused these issues, I threw around the possibility of writing something about the disconnect I felt with many Christian communities. At one point, I was working on a longer essay called “Weird Christian Girl,” which I never finished. When I started writing the title essay of my new book, I thought I was picking up where that piece left off.
However, a couple of months ago, I discovered I was wrong. I was watching an old video on Facebook of a poetry reading I gave at an open mic night in early 2017, a little over a month before the bottom fell out of our church experience.
When I got to the final poem in the reading, my jaw dropped as my 2017 self stated she was going to read a new piece titled “A Manifesto on Why I Dyed My Hair Purple.”
And, fortunately for you, I have a clip.
Like the above photo, watching that makes me sad too.
I was so angry.
It’s funny how some ideas take a long time to percolate. A short story you wrote in college plants a seed for a novel you’ll write years later. A poem you initially dismissed as “bad” shows up in a search on your computer in the future, and now, you know how to fix it.
A poem you read at an open mic and promptly forgot about unknowingly turns into the title essay for a book you’ll write about healing from the spiritual turmoil that produced it.
There’s a lesson here for writers. Just because something you’re creating isn’t working doesn’t mean it’s bad.
It might just be that you’re not ready to write it.
I remember reading once that the ideal length of time to process a traumatic experience before doing any serious writing about it is seven years.
The number of years isn’t the point though. I think it has more to do with your maturity, both personally and spiritually, with having the right verbal and experiential vocabulary to write about something painful.
When that happens, you might be surprised by where your ideas come from, or where they’ve been all along.
If your copy of Why I Dyed My Hair Purple has arrived or is currently on its way, I truly hope you enjoy it. I hope it is a balm for your own feelings of rejection or discomfort.
If you are in Christ, I hope it reminds you that our Sovereign God, who predestined you in love before the foundation of the world, to the praise of His glorious grace, cares about all parts of your story, no matter how seemingly unimportant they might be.
It’s an honor to get to share this story with you.
Why I Dyed My Hair Purple and Other Unorthodox Stories is now available via Calla Press Publishing, as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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