In less than a month, I will turn 24-years-old. Although I’ve had dozens of conversations with friends and family about the idea of aging, complete with whining, reminising and my dad proudly declaring that he was simply “50 plus tax,” it didn’t hit me until a couple months ago that I was aging too.

Aging is like one of those things you’re oblivious and immune to as a kid, sort of like paying bills, having a job and taking care of children. You just never think it’s going to happen to you.

Well it did. OH, it did.

Things started changing a couple months ago. At first, I noticed I could barely, just barely survive on six hours of sleep, when in high school and college, I managed most days on about four. Then, I kept getting the headaches that I only heard about in migraine medicine commercials. You know, the ones with a middle-aged woman grasping her temples in pain, while she sits in her cozy little kitchen with a cup of coffee. I didn’t think much of it and attributed it to the stress of work and traffic.

But two days ago, on a rather peculiar Monday morning, I woke up and headed straight to the bathroom, the first stop on my routine. After washing my face, I looked up at myself in the mirror and gasped in horror at what I had seen.

A white hair.

A white hair was growing on my head, more specifically on the right side of my head, blending with a sea of golden brown strands. A little white hair was staring back at me, making its presence clear, proclaiming to me that it wasn’t going anywhere, and pretty soon, his uncle, sister, brother and cousins were moving in too.

This one little hair had ruined me. This is what they mean, when they say the power of one, I thought.

As I panicked and feverishly searched around my hair as if I was Nancy Drew trying to find more clues, I saw flashes of my entire head covered in salt and pepper gray, with crows feet near my eyes, skin spots on my hands and the need for a hearing aid.

My panic (and flashes) went away when I calmed down after a search for more white strands turned up fruitless. For the next two days, I religiously checked for more white hairs before going about my business, and I suspect I’ll continue this routine until I realize that aging is inevitable and that there’s no point in me fighting it.  I suppose at the moment of the Great White Hair Discovery of 2008, I finally understood why women were so afraid of aging. I always thought that when my turn would come, I would respond quite nonchalantly and accept what was happening. I thought it was all so endearing. I remembered beautiful older women I admired, like Helen Mirren and Sigourney Weaver and how they completely embraced their age and looked just absolutely stunning, moreso now than before.

But subconsciously, I had reacted like any other typical woman, as if it was programmed within me to have a spaz attack about the lack of melanin in one hair strand. In time, I assume it wont be a big deal and the thought of white hair will be just that: a thought. However, for now, all I have to say is:

Thank God for hair dye.