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I am not my hair Comb. Ouch. Grab. Ouch. Pull. Ouch. Twist. Ouch. Take down. Ouch. Repeat. My hair has been tugged and pulled by foreign and familiar hands an unimaginable amount of times. The stabbing pain is sometimes unbearable, but there is no doubt that it has given me a HIGH tolerance for pain. “Beauty takes pain” is the motto my mother uses when she watches my sisters and I jerk and twist as we sit in a chair at the home of an anonymous person my mother found through the grapevine. My tears don’t appear until I stare at myself in the mirror, notice how tightly my hair has been pulled, and realize that the people at school tomorrow will never understand that I just suffered for 10 hours to be their idea of beautiful. My tears don’t appear until I go to school and the boys laugh at me and tell me I look like an alien. My tears don’t appear until I let their words eat me alive and ALL I want to do is take my hair out. My tears don’t appear until I pray to God at night that somehow, some way, I will wake up in the morning and my hair will be desirable to the boys that made me feel like I wasn’t enough. I prayed that I would have the long, wavy, hair that my friends constantly complained about and took for granted. I always wanted what I couldn’t have, and I knew I would never wake up with hair that was straight and silky. It became clear to me that the real problem lied within my own insecurities and I realized that what I had to do was learn to love my hair. Every five months I’d go through the same thing. Comb. Ouch. Grab. Ouch. Pull. Ouch. Twist. Ouch. Take down. Ouch. Repeat. When I go to sleep at night the feeling of a million needles on my pillow would emerge. I always felt like I needed to give people a reason for why I did things to my hair, as though everything I did was for their approval. I finally grew tired of hating my natural hair. My natural hair that wasn’t actually all that natural because I would permanently straighten my hair in between every single protective style. I knew that perms would just break my hair, l and I wanted my hair to grow, so once I got to high school, I decided that it was time to start my NATURAL hair journey. It took a lot of time, energy, and tears. There were a lot of low points where all I wanted to do was give up and shave my hair off. Then there were high points, like now, where my hair is thick, healthy, and beautiful. I can finally look in the mirror, see a huge black afro with tight kinky curls, and be completely obsessed with it. Many people don’t know what African-American women go through with their hair everyday, but that is okay because I know what I go through and I am PROUD of it. I do not regret starting my hair journey at all, and I am not ashamed of anything on my head. I have completely accepted my hair and I love it. |
–Uchechi Nwansi