She Dyed Her Hair Eggplant in a Small Town and That Was the Whole Lesson

Your yellow has been there the whole time

My cousin sent me a prompt this week. She asked me three questions and told me the answers had to be deep. Not surface level, actually deep.

1. What is your favorite color, and why?

2. What is your favorite animal, and why?

3. What is your favorite body of water, and why?

I didn’t overthink it.

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1. Yellow. Because it feels like my insides. It always has. Not the color I wear often or perform or put on for anyone, just what I’m made of on the inside when nothing is in the way.

2. Cats. Because they’re assholes and you always know where you stand. There’s no pretense. No performing devotion to keep the peace. A cat is exactly who it is and it expects you to figure out how to meet it there.

3. The ocean. Because it’s humbling and powerful and the more you try to control it, the more challenging it becomes, like life, it requires a certain amount of surrender.

I found out later that the secret to the prompt is what your answers are actually about.

• Your color is your view of your own personality and how you see yourself.

• Your animal reveals what you desire in an ideal, perfect partner.

• Your body of water is your view of your own sexuality, and your view toward intimacy.

I sat with that for a while.

And then something else came up. Something I’ve been circling around in how I talk about my work.

The goal was never to look the part. It was always to get the outsides to match the insides.

I was a shy kid. Painfully shy. I didn’t talk to strangers. Didn’t talk to my parents’ friends, unless I HAD to. Didn’t even want to talk to new kids because I never knew what they would think of me.

But I watched everything. I noticed everything. And somewhere underneath the shyness was this uncomfortable feeling that I couldn’t quite name, that the things other kids found interesting just felt a little small to me. Not because I was better. Just because I seemed to be wired to see something bigger and the small talk felt like static.

By the time I was a teenager, adults kept telling me I was an old soul. Wise beyond my years. I didn’t know what that meant because I only knew how to be me. Being me just meant saying the things that were on my mind, the thoughts that came to me, the things that made complete sense when I shared them with adults even when they landed weird with kids my age.

The kids often thought I was a weirdo.

And for a while I tried to fix that. Tried to come down to a register that felt less like me and more like everyone else. Tried to be regular. Tried to fit into whatever box they deemed acceptable.

Then somewhere in junior high I just stopped.

I don’t remember it as a big dramatic decision. I just remember deciding I didn’t want to be like anybody else. I wanted to be me. And in a small town, at a time when nobody was doing anything particularly interesting with their hair, I dyed mine eggplant. I also cut it short and permed it…one of those was a mistake. I’ll let you guess which one. It was the early 90s, go easy on me.

I got teased for it - the color - eggplant.

I didn’t stop.

I went pink. Purple. Blue. Orange. Yellow. All the colors that felt like they might be fun because they felt like me. And I noticed something happening as I started dressing in ways that felt more like me and less like whatever was trending. The more I let my outsides show what was actually happening on the inside, the more I felt like myself.

I wore silver lamé bellbottoms I made myself with a black leather biker jacket. I wore a pink tutu with green army boots and a purple velvet corset I made to prom, liberty spikes and all. I dug my mom’s 1960s bellbottoms out of her closet, the ones with the biggest bells, and wore them with crop tops because I liked them. Not because they were cool - they weren’t then, but because they were me.

That was the whole lesson.

Not the hair. Not the clothes. The choice underneath them. The decision to be visibly yourself in a room full of people who might reject you for it.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. The people I work with aren’t struggling because they don’t know enough. They’re struggling because the thing they know most, the thing that lights them up, the thing they could talk about for hours, whether that’s intuitive gifts or psychic knowing or astrology or the Akashic records or tea leaves or some obsessive way they connect things nobody else is connecting, that thing has a lock and key on it the moment they try to bring it into their work.

They cover it in beige. Bland, safe, palatable beige. Because somewhere along the way they learned that their yellow was too much.

That’s the thing we go looking for in Metamorphosis. That’s the eggplant hair. That’s your version of the pink tutu and the liberty spikes. The thing that is so inherently you that hiding it is slowly making you disappear.

The world doesn’t need another beige coach. It needs your weirdness. Your obsession. Your particular way of connecting things that normal everyday people don’t connect.

That’s your yellow. And it’s been there the whole time.

If this landed somewhere true for you, Metamorphosis is where we do this work together. It’s a six month container. The next cohort starts in January.