The pitfalls of the man I became/ For years and years/ I chased their cheers/ The crazy speed of always needing more/ Bu

Well, that sealed the deal. Every time a man that age tells me what to do, I do the opposite. Even though I knew he was right. I’m in the media. The image I’ve always projected is fresh and high energy. In other words: young. It goes without saying that there are very few high-powered women role models with gray hair. Sure, Jane Fonda decided to go gray in 2020, but have you seen the amount of makeup she wears to counteract its aging effect? A recent fashion trend has women in their twenties dying their hair gray. Old head, strikingly young face. The contrast has impact. But a middle-aged face with the hair to match isn’t fashionable. It’s just dull reality. I’m seriously concerned that my hair will limit my job prospects. That sentence is so stupid but, while the situation for older women has improved, they are still mostly invisible in society. Irrelevant. The other day, out of the blue, I got an email from Google with stats on how many people had googled me, and their top growing queries. Number one? manoush zomorodi age. (Number two: manoush zamorodi; number three: manoush zomorodi nationality. These were less surprising.),When I first pitched this article in September, two (female) editors declined. Lockdown had ended; women were returning to salons. They felt that the gray-roots phase of the pandemic was coming to an end. That’s not true. Our contingent is just smaller, and more hardcore. I lock eyes all the time with women who, like me, have decided to ride this out. It’s easy to recognize us: We all have exactly six-eight inches of roots. We are part of a secret but very visible sorority, with no motivational comments cheering us to “embrace our power” as we walk down the street. Some of us are happy to hide behind our masks. Others don’t give a shit. But I’m certain we’re experiencing the days and weeks differently, pacing ourselves.,When August rolled around, I truly looked like a calico cat. I carefully watched both political conventions, and not a single woman had gray or white hair. Same with The Office, which my family was binge-watching. Also same with the movie Gloria, the original Spanish version, which is about women getting older. What the hell? My hair was starting to symbolize, to me anyway, another lie in an era of misinformation.,I wept through that song. This was what my husband needed to see. All his chasing of dreams, moving us a dozen times in as many years, pursuing happiness and some mysterious “enough” when it was right in front of him the whole time.,It seems like there’s a process grombre women typically go through, like the five steps of grief. Grief, however, is internal. Going gray is very public. I decided to “own it,” as the commentators on the #grombre account advised. When I posted a photo of my roots on my own Instagram, it got more comments and suggestions than anything I’d ever posted. People had opinions. “Use a sharpie!” one friend joked. “Went #grombe after Hurricane Sandy and never regretted it,” another posted. “I lost all my hair last year in chemo…loving it any color,” one woman wrote. #perspective,I’m an incredibly privileged person and, like many people with means and options, I’m trying to think about what I’m willing to give up in this world so that more people can have opportunities. One very small thing I can do is be a public person — a woman — with gray hair. I know there will be more women with gray, white, and silver hair in your life, and mine, two years from now. I want to imagine a future where these older women are visible… and not just to each other.,It is looking likely that the A14X chip is going to be amazing! If the 12-inch MacBook is this chip, it’ll probably be just a smudge slower than the 13-inch MacBook Pro and you’re paying approximately $1000 less.,We chose to build gnmi-gateway in Golang given the first-class support for protobufs in Go and that much of the existing reference code for gNMI exists in Golang. Although we chose Golang, clients for the gNMI protocol can be generated for any language with Protobuf 3 tools. Network operators should feel encouraged to deploy gnmi-gateway to manage connections to gNMI targets and write consuming gNMI applications in the language that is most appropriate for their situation.,Every night, the family and I went for a socially-distant swim at the house next door. I thought about how, possibly next summer, I wouldn’t have to worry about the chlorine turning my fake brown hair orange and could swim carefree underwater again. “Growing out your hair will make you look old,” advised the 70-year-old neighbor who generously let us use his pool, “Don’t do it.”,Who will I be if I’m suddenly treated a decade older this winter than I was in the spring? I’m not sure. Between the election, schools reopening, and financial instability, everyone is constantly reminding each other to take things one day at a time. But I’m also very much envisioning the future: the day my transformation is complete. When I chop off the dead ends. And today — at least at this moment — I feel quietly optimistic that I, alongside my #grombre sisters, will be able to look in the mirror and embrace this new, “real” self. And I wonder: What will the world even be like then? What will I be like? Will the pandemic be over? Will we have started fixing this janky nation?,Me? I was still on the fence (maybe Grieving, Phase Four: Depression?), but I was also fascinated by how much I cared. I highlighted passages in the one good book I could find on the subject (Going Gray by Anne Kreamer) and cringed while listening to the hosts of the Everything’s Fine podcast lament the “pubic texture” of their incoming grays. With the election and recession and second (third?) Covid wave, the time I spent mulling whether to give up and go back to brunette felt incredibly self-indulgent. One day I plopped down next to my sister on the porch and started talking (for the n-teenth time) about how conflicted I felt about my hair. She took a final bite of her salad, said, “This conversation is getting really boring,” and walked away.,Meanwhile, some of my family members didn’t find my transition very funny. My daughter hated the crown of gray and white and sometimes avoided looking at me. “I don’t want an old mommy,” she told me. Her comments hurt my feelings, but I also kind of understood that my transformation was, well, shocking. If I’d gone the route nature intended, my brown hair would have incrementally faded away over the course of her 10-year lifetime. She wouldn’t have even noticed. Now, just as she’s starting to preen in the mirror herself, mommy is aging at an accelerated pace. Within months, I’d gone from passing for 37 years old (or so I’ve been told) to looking my 47 years. It’s disconcerting for both of us. My 13-year-old son and my husband didn’t comment much; they’d curiously peer at my head occasionally and say, “I think I like it!”,I vacillate between hating what I see in the mirror and being profoundly curious about my transformation. Do I look like a Persian Bonnie Raitt? I’m not sure I would have had the gumption to go through this process were it not for the pandemic and now, being part of this small feminist gray movement. Yes, some of these women will go back to the bottle and looking like a version of their younger selves. That consistency is indeed very comforting. But the world is in a very uncomfortable place. Consistency has gone out the window.,I asked one woman eating ice cream on a bench next to her white-haired husband how she was doing. She knew exactly what I was referring to. “Right now it looks awful when it’s not in a bun. But I’m gonna stick with it, even though I read it takes about two years,” she said. Clearly, she’s been doing the same Google searches I have. Her speckled brown and gray hair softly framed her face. At the back, a flaming artificial-red coil of hair was pinned in place.,He was running away from himself towards a dream that didn’t exist and would never fulfil him even if it did. His problems weren’t ones that could be fixed by the right job, the right amount of success, the right place to live.