I gave up dyeing my gray hair 2 years ago. I'm done worrying about aging or 'fixing' my appearance.

• I stopped dyeing my hair when salons closed at the beginning of the pandemic.
• When things reopened, I decided not to go back. I embraced my gray hair out of laziness at first.

I'm 46, and my last hair coloring was exactly 2 1/2 years ago. At the beginning of the pandemic, I couldn't go to my normal salon for months. Not a fan of boxed dyes, I let my grays grow in. When things started to open up in the summer of 2020, I was too lazy to go back. I'd realized how much I hated going in to get my hair colored, so I stopped doing it. Going natural made me wonder why I'd been dyeing my hair for over 20 years.

Now that I'm fully gray, I feel different: I feel empowered to not try to please anyone anymore. In fact, it feels like I'm done doing all the things I've done in the past to try to "fix" myself, and I've discovered that how I look — and what I derive my happiness from in general — is my business.

Getting comfortable with my gray hair

Reactions to my gray hair have been incredibly supportive, aside from a few weird comments. I've gotten everything from "What's going on with your hair?" to the simple but effective "Gray??" My own dad did a double take when he first saw me after I stopped dyeing it.

When I could no longer hide the gray grow-out with baseball caps or winter hats, there it was: a salt-and-pepper mix with a few bold skunk stripes in the front. I received uplifting direct messages on Zoom calls. I've been chased down in a parking lot to be told my hair had "a whole Andie MacDowell thing going on."

My hair has made me something I've always been too scared to be: visible. At first, all the attention I was receiving was uncomfortable, even if the vast majority of it was positive and filled with love. But then I understood that these were real reactions, and they helped me feel less scared to be real as well.

I realized I'd been fighting myself for a long time

It seems I've always been trying to change something about myself, whether my hair, my body, or my size. Every second of my post-teen life — as it is for so many of us — has been consumed with fixing or changing myself to fit in or soothe unhappiness.

In high school I lightened my curly hair with Sun-In and straightened it, wishing for a long, swinging ponytail. In college I played soccer and was overwhelmed with balancing schoolwork and sports. Finding stability meant controlling my body, so I combined overexercising with undereating. I lost my period for a year and a half, while double majoring with straight A's. Rather than celebrating my body for all it was doing on the soccer field and in the classroom, I was shaming it into submission.

After college, when the pressure was off, things calmed down. That's when I began to notice the first few grays sprouting right in the front of my head. I started occasionally visiting the salon to color my hair a rich brown or deep plum. Then, when I was 25, my mother died. There was no stable ground to be found. Even in deep grief, I was still dragging myself to get highlights.

Ten years later, I was pregnant with my first child, and the waves of weight gain and loss threw me overboard emotionally. My gray hairs multiplied. However, the messages we send pregnant people are often conflicting; we want new parents to "embrace motherhood" and to "bounce back from the baby!" at the same time. So I started running again and began going to the salon every four weeks. I see now that these efforts to fix myself were coping behaviors, and they gave me a false sense of control over aging, my changing body, and the ways my life was shifting.

The transition hasn't been seamless, but it has been rewarding

Going natural has not been an easy process. Do I love the way my hair looks every day? Definitely not, but it has felt like relief and reminds me to be generous with myself and others. My kids see older pictures of me with my dark hair and say, "Mommy, you look so young!" I do look young, but I've learned so much since then. And while I sometimes consider returning to that hair color, I don't miss the anxious waters of upkeep.

My 30-year chapter of trying to gain control over my life through "fixing" my appearance is finally over. I now have a better understanding of who I am — as a friend, wife, and mother — and I appreciate that person. I want to model for my kids that we can find peace even if we don't know who we are just yet, or if it feels weird along the way. We can be our full selves.

My gray hair is me, discovering more. I'm finding the fun in aging and returning to myself. It's only taken 46 years. And I know there's so much more to learn.