Category: Topic Tuesdays: Raw & Personal

Hey guys, welcome back to TNTH.

This post was inspired by a YouTuber I follow on Twitter named Tasha Leelyn. Her YouTube channel boomed when she was the face of semi-permanent hair dyes and pastel hair; she had bleached and dyed her hair crazy, funky colors for the last three years and as of last year, she dyed it back to dark brown. For obvious reasons, her hair was extremely damaged from the constant bleach that even gave her chemical burn during one bleach job. Many of her old-time viewers began writing in her comments, “I miss Old Tasha!”, “I miss the pastel hair!”, and “I miss watching your hair videos!” On the outside, it’s easy to say that to a person without personally knowing them and it’s also very common for people to be subscribed to a person for a specific type of content and when that person doesn’t do it anymore, they ultimately unsubscribe. Watching her as “Dark Brown Hair Tasha” for the past year and looking back at her videos from her pastel days, I can see why she chose to change her hair color, and I can see just how doing something as simple as that could be the answer to true happiness. I experienced this for myself in the last 6 years.

The first major hair change I had was during my senior year in high-school. I went completely blonde after having dark-brown hair all my life. It gave me the attention and confidence that I thought was going to make me feel better. In a way, the blonde hair made people notice me. I was seen and people liked me better with my blonde hair. But, the blonde hair was a cover-up since the beginning. I only went completely blonde because I wanted to be unrecognizable. I wanted to be a completely different person because I hated who I was, and who I’ve become. Even with all of the compliments and people liking me with blonde hair, I wasn’t getting better. I wasn’t feeling better, and people didn’t notice that because my bright, blonde hair masked my depression.

People have this assumption that when women dye their hair darker (i.e from blonde to dark brown or black), that’s usually the sign to notice their depression or sadness going on in their lives. Dark hair usually blends in with the crowd; you don’t notice someone so quickly when most of the world is brunette or generally dark haired. Many of the people who’ve experimented with bright/pastel hair color can tell you that one of the main reasons they decided to do an unnatural hair color is to literally become different people. In a way, they want to reintroduce themselves as a new person, hence why they choose hair colors that are different and that stand-out.

I kept my hair blonde for months, despite it becoming brittle and damaged after touching up my roots once a month. Once I had to give up the blonde, my new addition was hair dye, both natural and unnatural, because I already knew that I was able to change myself after every bad event in my life. For most of 2012 and 2013, I constantly changed the color and cut off my hair whenever I got the chance to. People deemed me this hair goddess that could do no wrong to my hair, and my hair suddenly became my only source of identity. People called me eccentric and different, and I tried to hold on to that identity for as long as I could.

Every now and then, I will look back and notice how I would use my hair as a security blanket. My hair had to be long, my hair had to be some sort of blonde, whether all over or in an ombre, and my hair had to change frequently. I went through a lot of variations to find the color I felt like myself in, and that’s okay to go through that stage to find what hair color and hairstyle makes you feel the most like you. But with every change came a new thing that I wasn’t happy about in life. I knew as a young adult that life happens, but I couldn’t comprehend that changing my hair meant that those unresolved issues would just disappear. I just kept piling more and more baggage into my hair changes and at a certain point, the damage was irreversible.

Before.

After.

On March 22nd, 2016, I decided that I was going to stop bleaching and coloring my hair to let my hair grow long and healthy. I picked up a box of black hair dye, a color that I ultimately avoided using knowing the difficulty of removing it from hair altogether, dyed my hair that night, and thus started almost two years of revelation. 

While rocking this new black hair of mine, I started to realize that I was beginning to not rely on constantly changing the color whenever I needed to mask an issue I was having. I was forced to confront it in some way. I’m not going to lie and say that this urge to suddenly changed my hair disappeared after learning that you don’t need to do so to feel better about yourself. Most of last year, I fell back into the habit of bleaching and changing my hair back and forth from color to color and because of that most of my hair had to be cut off. If anything, having to have short and black hair has made me ultimately go into “Hair Rehab” as I like to call it. It’s also made me appreciate and learn more about myself as a person, not just “the girl who changes her hair a lot”. For a person who uses their hair as a security blanket, having my hair in its current state has challenged me to seek beauty in more ways than just one. Yeah, I have my moments were the comments of “I miss blonde/ombre Liz” get to me. I look back at old photos and I tell myself how pretty my hair was before. But every time I do look at these photos, I see these words on them. I see myself in that time of my life. I tell myself that I don’t want to have that hair again because I don’t want to be a depiction of who I was. And I wish that people and those around me were able to see those words in these pictures when they say, “oh my God, I like you with this hair color.” But they can’t, and so what if they don’t? I see them, and they give me the reason why I am where I am today.

Personally, my dark, black hair just fits me. It’s close to my natural hair color, and it makes me look healthy. I feel like with blonde/other colored hair, I look very pale and not healthy-looking in the face. Surprisingly, my black hair puts color on my face and suits me better than any color I ever had.

This is my signature color, and it’s the reason why every time I try to lighten my hair I feel a little weird and not myself. Life with my black hair has made me the happiest I’ve been in a really long time. My hair color, my style, and my mentality are now my own and I felt more like me than I ever did in the recent years.

-Liz. (:

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH.

Let me start off this post by publicly stating that this post is by no means an attack on people who identify as a man or any term regarding masculinity. This post is simply influenced by a Facebook post a friend of mine had on her timeline and ended being possibly one of the most disgusting things I read in her comments section. The shared article was about Oklahoma’s insane outlook on women and abortions. In a nutshell, women need to be granted permission by men in order to move forward with an abortion. Without being too political, I am pro-choice. I believe it is up to the women to decide what she wants to do with her body. I believe that in certain circumstances, getting an abortion shouldn’t be out of the question. My friend, Tori, mentioned this scenario to the man she was debating with. Women who are rape victims could potentially get pregnant with their rapist’s child. I remember taking a literature class during my undergrad year where a girl had shared with the class that she has conceived the night a man raped her mother. Years later, I still remember all of the thoughts in my mind, thinking what she possibly goes through in her head day-to-day. Many women get into this scenario; many people just don’t speak about it because these women never report them. This person then began to justify the actions of Brock Turner, the high-profile story of him raping a girl behind a dumpster while she was unconscious. That’s where I had to draw the line and it was immensely difficult to stop reading.

The comments this man publicly posted under my friend’s shared article was a prime example of the toxic masculinity surfacing in a time were movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp exist. Right now, men in various different industries are beginning to be called out by women who are finally finding the courage to speak out and have their voices heard. I’ve actually heard men in my family say some really crazy shit about this topic, and the only reasoning I could make of it is because men nowadays feel the need to have a defense mechanism. Some men feel the need to defend their manhood and their gender as a whole; I know this is nothing compared to Black Lives Matter, but the way men are trying to defend themselves is the same way “Blue Lives Matter” became a thing. 

In other words, nobody would be saying anything if the current set of events were not happening.

Again, I am not saying all men are scum or trash and are the devils in humanity. I am simply saying that there are some men out there who will rather defend a man’s morally wrong actions instead of actual facts just to protect the overall idea of manhood and masculinity. 

When women chant “a man ain’t shit if he doesn’t understand no”, men respond “she was all on me at the club, dancing on me, why wasn’t she saying no earlier tonight?” When women chant “men are trash if they think it’s cute to verbally/physically abuse women”, men respond “you don’t know what women do to provoke us. Isn’t it just common sense to respect a human’s wishes and if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say at all and to NEVER harm another human being?

This idea that men have to enforce their masculinity by being strong and aggressive and masculine is one of the problems in society. Yes, we could also get into women and the things they do that are problematic because nobody in this world is perfect. What I find crazy is that the morals of everyday life are still getting questioned if it’s right or if it’s wrong.

Toxic masculinity is definitely something that is being observed more and more each day. We see it in our friends, our families, our neighbors, our coworkers; it pretty much exists in every single person who identifies as a cis man because it no doubt stems from the way these men were raised. It goes all the way back to childhood when families would praise the son for having a girlfriend yet scold the daughter for even liking a boy in her class. That boys will be boys bullshit excused their rough, aggressive playing on the playground. That teasing a girl to the point of bullying her was a sign that a boy secretly liked you. That crying and showing emotions meant you were a “pussy” or “faggot”. That if you liked girly things and the same sex, you were not considered a man anymore. That you had to be a certain way to be considered a man in society because if you’re anything but a man in it, you are looked down upon.

Fellas, we aren’t asking you to not be men, we are asking you to be functional human beings that understand what is morally right from morally wrong and to be mindfully open about the things happening in the world. We live in such a progressive world; the only way you’ll understand it all is to keep an open and explorative mind to it.

Masculinity and Femininity are simply labels. They are irrelevant to issues that are morally right and wrong. I’m not saying abortion is morally wrong or right indefinitely; that’s a debate that will never be black or white. The issue of sexually harassment, sexual assault, and rape should be something that is always looked at as morally wrong, whether the offender is male or female, or other. Rape is universally fucking wrong, no matter what your gender is.

So tell me this: is it really worth it justifying wrongfully moral actions to “save” your manhood? The same goes for women. The same goes for humanity.

-Liz. (:

Hey guys, welcome back to TNTH!

I know my life is basically nothing but books and papers at the moment, but I wanted to stop by the blog and express this thought I’ve had on my mind for the last couple of weeks. So yes, this is going to be grad-school related.

I make it loud and clear on how much I identify as a writer. I am a writer, and I’ve been one for the last ten years. I started to take writing seriously when I was in high-school, and since then, I’ve been working on ways that I can make writing a legitimate career. Being a writer was what made me major in English both during undergrad and now in grad. I know I’m not perfect at it, but I’m learning as I go.

As an undergrad English major, you don’t get to see a complete picture of what you get yourself into. I believed at the time, the Undergraduate English Program was one of the strongest programs at my college. Entering the program again as a graduate student made me see otherwise.

Hence, the title of this post.

I am mentally tired of being a writer in an environment where it favors its readers. There’s nothing wrong being a reader, but why are the readers celebrated and the writers aren’t? As a graduate student, the MA English program at my college allows you to pick from two different concentrations: Literature, and Rhetoric/Writing Composition. Of course, I chose the latter, because I am studying to be a writer. Possibly being one of 12 students in that concentration, I am surrounded by readers in the Literature concentration. Readers who get a diverse selection of genres to read and study. If one reader is a Shakespeare lover, they have a class for that. If one reader likes 19-Century Literature, there’s a class for that. If one reader is a Multicultural Literature wizard, there are multiple classes for that.

If you’re a writer who likes to write for digital media, nothing. If you’re a writer who wants to write for business, nothing. If you are a writer interested in creative non-fiction writing, there is a class for that, but there are no professors qualified to teach it. 

If you’re looking to learn how to teach writing because you’re studying to become an English teacher, then that’s right up your alley.

You’re probably asking yourself “then why did you choose to go there in the first place, Liz?” I’m not going to say I was tricked into the program, but let me ask you this: who offers a concentration with specific requirements in a graduate program that doesn’t offer any courses for that specific concentration?

My point exactly.

Being a writer in an environment where they don’t care about your needs or requirements is mind-boggling. Being a writer around other peers who are readers and don’t see your importance in the program is discouraging. Being a writer in an institution where there aren’t no qualified faculty to teach writing is limiting to its students.

Writers are just as important as the readers in the program. it’s unfair to cater to one demographic of your program when there’s two. It’s unfair that the writers in your program feel like they literally have to fight to get respect in the program. I will be the first to admit I am NOT a reader, and I honestly believe there’s more to English than literature. Yeah, it’s an important factor to the subject, and writers do need to read to become better writers, but how are you teaching me how to be a writer in the outside world? Am I going to be writing book summaries for the rest of my life? Am I going to be writing theses and essays about books as a career? You’re teaching your writers to write better, but you’re not teaching us how to become better writers. You’re teaching us how to write for your literature classes.

Many of you may not agree with what I have to say. Many of you will see this and say “Liz, you’re not right.” I’ve been told I wasn’t right by other readers. Writers? You guys know what I’m talking about.

How many of you writers are actually doing something with writing? How many of you are sitting at home, reading this, confused because you don’t know how to take your writing skills and put them out into the real world? How many of you are discouraged because you had faculty tell you that writing isn’t going to get you far in life, “you should just teach it?” I’ve felt all of these things in just the last two months alone.

Take your writers seriously, English world. Keep your writers wanting to write. Their passion, their words, and their voices matter too in your world.

Most importantly, your readers need something to read.

-Liz (:

Hey, guys. Welcome back to TNTH.

I don’t write these types of posts to annoy any of my readers. I don’t go away for a bit and then come back just so that I can write these more freestyle posts about where I’ve been or why I left in the first place. I write these types of posts because TNTH is a place where I can be myself. Write as me. These types of posts are just as important as the other ones; they all represent a part of me I am willing to share out to the world publicly.

If you don’t want to hear another “this is what happened” story out of me, then this post isn’t for you. That’s okay.

If you decide to continue to hear what I have to say, then thank you for supporting TNTH.

Continue reading “Thank You for Supporting TNTH.” →