My "Hair Journey"

I have been inspired by a conversation between Dr. Melissa Harris Perry and Michaela Angela . They were speaking on the situation of the Black woman in America--a very BROAD way of describing the profound conversation that really occurred. The issue of black hair briefly came up and it sent my mind on a whirlwind of my own "hair journey". My mother raised me with a very strong conviction that there is no such thing as "good hair". I believed her, yet at the same time found it hard to believe for several reasons. One being, I had a lot of white friends with long, flowing, hair whose edges looked the same as the rest of their head. The second reason being I had a relaxer. As a little girl I had a tender head to rival all tender-headedness. At the age of 8, the relaxer was the remedy to my fits and tantrums during my hair-styling time. Fast forward to the age of 17, India Arie releases a song called, "I Am Not My Hair" and my best friend and I shamelessly announced, I AM MY HAIR! I truly believed it. I had long, relaxed hair that I would not dream of cutting any shorter than a shoulder length cut. I was attached to my hair. It was my crown of glory and my defining feature of beauty. My senior year of college I found out that I could still straighten my hair with a great deal of success without a relaxer. So I stopped getting relaxers. This was a time when the natural hair movement was permeating social media. I kept hearing of the "hair journey". I was dead set on NOT calling my decision to not get relaxers a "journey" and simply referred to it as a choice. I am not one groups so I was not trying to be apart of this national cohort of natural hair divas. I did not despise them, nor did I admire them. I simply wanted my chemical free decision to be just that: my decision. Then I moved to the Bay Area in California. This is the land of the "go with what you know" style. No more was I confined by the judgmental looks of Ohioans, therefore, I could experiment. So, I did a medium chop. 75% of my long, relaxed hair fell to the floor as my aunt chopped me into "natural hair territory. I still had some relaxed ends, but for the first time since I was 8, I felt a handfull of curly softness right on the top of my head. And I really liked it! There are days when I feel like the Bay makes me feel more hair freedom. For instance, The first time I went back to Ohio after my first chop, I felt the need to flat iron my hair. I questioned myself as I flat ironed my hair. Am I not confident enough? Will my family be used to this? Am I used to my curls? Is it too short? My Ohio curl-liberation came when I went swimming with my sister who fully embraced her natural hair journey by getting sisterlocks. As I plunged my flat-ironed hair into the once forbidden pool of water, I emerged with little curls forming on my head. She looked at me with a smile and said, "Your really do have curls!". Needless to say, I kept my curls for the rest of the trip. I was tempted to flat iron my hair again when I went to visit a friend of mine who had never even seen my hair short and definitely not natural. In the moment that I resisted the urge to pull out the blow dryer and flat iron, I knew it was time for me to embrace the concept of a hair journey. I finally understood why it is called a journey. I would even go so far as to call it a transformation. My self-image was deeply engrained with socially acceptable images of beauty. Even as a young girl, I understood that my hair as a black woman was not the socially acceptable definition of beauty. Even within the black community, natural hair has become the alternative to chemically altered hair. Not that I am out to knock choices and variety--after all, the fact that black hair can be straightened, braided, twisted, coiled, curled, crimped, waved, wet and wild add to it's beauty and versatility. What I am coming to understand about my journey is not that it's just about the time between my first chop and so on, rather it is about the very beginning of my understanding of my image being so closely tied to my hair. I realize that the more I love my curls, the more I am loving me.