Gray Hair and Disagreements
My gray hair freed up my personality
When I first let my hair go gray, I noticed an odd change in my personality. I’ve always been a person of strong opinions, but when I was younger, I tended to be somewhat tentative about expressing them to strangers or in crowds. (My family, of course, will tell you that they never saw such timidity.)
Along with my gray hair, however, I developed a much less circumspect attitude in the world at large. I’m not talking about the “my way or the highway” or “if you don’t agree with me, you can’t be my friend” kind of discord that we’re seeing these days. I’m talking about the ability to express my opinion, even if it isn’t going to win friends or make people like me.
My new attitude first appeared while I was walking with my friend Cynthia in New York City’s Central Park, when a couple of teens playing inline hockey on the walkway accidentally hit my leg hard with their puck. I picked up the puck and put it in my pocket. The kids skated up to me and asked for it back.
“Well,” I said, “first give me your names and addresses so I can have my lawyer contact you in case my leg gets worse.” They looked at me in horror. “Well, it’s kind of dumb to be playing this kind of game on a public path filled with old ladies and little kids.”
“If we promise to go somewhere else to practice, will you give it back?” one of them asked.
“Sure,” I said, “but I still need your info in case I hear that you just went to another busy spot in the park and injured someone else.”
“We’ll go to the skate park right now,” said the other teen.
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I gave them the puck back. Cynthia laughed when they left and said, “I can’t believe you did that. Who have you turned into?”
“My grandmother,” I told her.
Grandma dyed her hair blonde until she died at the age of 86, so my new attitude obviously didn’t have anything to do with the color of my hair. But it felt to me like it did. Research has shown that societal attitudes towards gray hair vary widely, but that we all bring our own beliefs to the table when we encounter someone with gray hair or turn gray ourselves.
Some deeply hidden part of me must have believed that becoming gray gave me permission to be more, ummm… hopefully not aggressive, but assertive. But other, more accessible, parts worried that I was courting disaster by opening up more discord in my life.
So when I was at a webinar recently in which the respected innovator in infant and child development, Dr. Ed Tronick, was interviewed. I was fascinated to hear him say that he believed discord was crucial to healthy development. His theory of “rupture and repair,” based on years of observation of parents and young children and infants, is that we would never learn to manage disappointment, hurt, and difficult interpersonal experiences if we didn’t have moments of discord and disharmony.
The research tells us that the repair of these ruptures is an extremely important component of the learning process. If there is no opportunity to make things right, we become depressed and/or anxious or both. We lose our sense of agency or competence in the world, or we never develop it in the first place.
I wish the interviewer had asked Dr. Tronick how he thought this concept was playing out in the world today, when we are all clustering with folks who believe the same things we do. I remember as a kid hearing my parents argue about the presidential election of 1956. My mother was a staunch fan of Democrat candidate Adlai Stevenson, while my father was planning to vote for Eisenhower, the Republican candidate.
I can’t say I loved the arguments, but I did learn that two people who love each other can have strongly divergent opinions. I recently started reading the book, I Love You but I Hate Your Politics by a former classmate of mine, Jeanne Safer, who describes herself as “a liberal Democrat married for thirty-nine years to a senior editor at National Review, the leading conservative journal of opinion.” Safer’s goal in writing this book is to let people know that it’s possible to have serious political discord with someone you love. She promotes civil, safe disagreements and, like Tronick, healthy reparation and connection.
My recognition that I could disagree nicely, even with someone who hit me in the leg with a hockey puck, seemed to emerge around the time that my hair turned gray and my psyche adjusted to being an older person.
I just wish I knew how we could all learn that lesson much earlier in life.
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