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Here’s a Weird Anxiety Treatment: Dye Your Hair Pink
Research kind of backs this up, too.
There’s kind of a lot going on in the picture above.
To start off, my hair is pink, but we’ll talk more about that in a moment. I’m also wearing a bronze medal from the 2021 IBJJF No-Gi Pans (I lost a heartbreaker in the semifinals), and I have a huge gash on my eye.
In my first match of the tournament, I got kicked in the face (I think — it’s all a blur at this point) and I spent the rest of the tournament bleeding profusely all over the mats, my opponents, and my clothes for the rest of the weekend. It was a mess, and so was I.
However, in the end, all of these things were incredibly temporary. I got over the loss and got right back to training on Monday. My pink hair faded. The scab healed up and became a scar. I got stitches for the first time.
All that’s survived from that weekend are a medal that now lives in my medal shoebox in my room, a scar right above my eyeball, and a few pictures where I look like a kid who’s trying way too hard to impersonate a Dragon Ball character at his Jiu-Jitsu tournament.
All that’s survived is the medal, those pictures, and an important life lesson I learned from competing in one of my biggest events of the year while having pink…
