Measured

it all adds up

Not long after I found out that my dad wasn’t genetically related to me, I noticed ridges crossing all my fingernails. Dipped down, slightly wavy.

As my nails grew the lines moved up with them until they’d grown out. I knew that illness or stress could cause changes in the nail bed, so I thought of them as tree rings, the dendrochronology of my DNA discovery. I was rather fond of the ridges and found it soothing to feel the change in topography, a reminder that I didn’t make any of this up. For the first few months after I found out, I had to talk myself through what I had learned, remind myself what was and wasn’t true, a few times a day at minimum.

I noticed, too, that my hair was grayer than it used to be. At first I assumed it was because I’d stopped coloring it but realized I hadn’t colored it in about a year. I’d long had a couple white streaks in the front that I quite liked but by late spring my dark brown hair had become decidedly silver.

People’s hair turning white after a shock is actually a thing, it turns out.

From NIH.gov Health Capsule newsletter, April 2020:

Nerves in your sympathetic nervous system—which is responsible for the body’s fight-or-flight response—go throughout the body, including into hair follicles. The study showed that stress causes the release of the chemical norepinephrine into the follicle.

Norepinephrine affects the melanocyte stem cells living there. It causes them to rapidly turn into pigment cells and move out of the hair follicles. Without stem cells left to create new pigment cells, new hair turns gray or white.

Hair grows about half an inch a month. I measured my white strands the other day—four and a half inches out from the root. It was February of this year, nine months ago, that I found out.

Our bodies are pretty remarkable. And silver-brown hair is beautiful.