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My best friend\/cousin (because Black people love to make people our cousins) was the first person in my life to go natural. I didn\u2019t understand it. The relaxer life was so easy. Why would she choose to struggle with her hair unnecessarily?<\/p>\n
I had just talked my mother into letting me get relaxers again a couple of years before, and was overjoyed by how much easier it was to manage my hair. Up until that point, I had a standing every-other-week appointment to get my hair pressed. While it kept my hair sleek, Black hair with no chemicals in the Texas heat and humidity, or any sweating I might have done playing sports in middle school and high school, was a recipe for disaster. Swimming? And then do all this hair after?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s probably why I can\u2019t swim now.<\/p>\n
Anyways, several years later I was in college and playing with the idea of going natural too. While the process wasn\u2019t very popular yet, I realized that I missed the way my hair used to curl up when it got wet, and I hated the way I ended up with chemical burns on my scalp every eight weeks.<\/p>\n
But was I really ready?<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Ten weeks into my first attempt at going natural I decided that I wasn’t. My roots decided to rebel during a particularly misty football game I attended and I made an appointment to get a relaxer two weeks later. Not too long after that I regretted it, and found myself wishing I had waited a little longer, or asked for tips on how to fight the urge to go back to relaxers. I just hadn\u2019t been ready to risk my hair looking \u201cthe fool.\u201d During my undergraduate years, my hair was always on point. I stayed whipped and dipped with no weave added, and eventually began to pride myself on it. While I was nervous about letting that perceived aspect of my identity go, I knew I wanted to try again.<\/p>\n
October 17, 2011 was the date of my last relaxer. I\u2019m now almost six years natural and loving it! I have no thoughts of ever going back. Throughout these years I\u2019ve talked to many of my friends who were considering it and shared my tips, tricks, and difficulties with transitioning and being natural, so when another very good friend of mine was considering it, I was ecstatic. We discussed some of my experiences up to that point and talked about what she could expect from the process. Afterwards, she thanked me and admitted that she was still a little nervous about going natural. I understood. I still remember that same nervousness and hesitation I felt when I took the plunge.<\/p>\n
Not wanting her to be misled or discouraged, I told her that it wasn\u2019t going to be easy, but that she would get used to it. It hadn\u2019t been easy for me either, but it had<\/em> taught me how to really love myself.<\/p>\n I typed those words and pushed send on the text message before I really thought about what I had said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s big for you.\u201d She texted back.<\/p>\n \u201cI know,\u201d I responded. Because it might have been the most honest and transparent I had been in my life up to that point.<\/p>\n Going through the phases of transitioning your hair takes patience, and often a strong mind and the ability to give yourself a little grace when it comes to what your hair looks like. There were days I didn\u2019t have time to wash and straighten my hair, so I had to wear my curls. Days my twist outs didn\u2019t cooperate (most attempts failed). Days my curls wouldn\u2019t sit right, or were frizzier than I liked and I rarely ever had a headful of perfect ringlets.<\/p>\n But one day, I decided that I was okay with that. I had struggled with self-esteem for the better part of 23 years, and I do mean STRUGGLED. So much so that in undergrad a group of my friends attempted to stage an intervention. Looking back, I realized that looking perfect was a smaller detail compared to the level of perfection I was frustrated by not achieving in other areas. I had been pushing myself to make perfect decisions, sound perfect, interact with others perfectly, achieve perfectly. I had an intense need to seem perfect, for a lot of different reasons, and I hardly ever felt that I was close enough to these standards to feel good about myself.<\/p>\n That was a lesson this late bloomer hadn\u2019t grasped yet. My spirit recognized it days, months or maybe even years sooner than my brain did.<\/p>\n For many of us, self-confidence and self-esteem are like going natural: a journey. It\u2019s a series of false starts and mishaps (like the time . . . okay fine, all the times that I skipped out on detangling properly and had to cut a knot out of my hair, the most recent time being last month<\/em>). There are setbacks (I accidentally cut a braid while taking out some weave once too<\/em>). Sometimes you just need your friends to install the two bags of 1B Remy Velvet that was the same length as your natural hair because you just need a break (boys rock 20-inch Peruvian loose wave these days. He brought me from a mighty long way, y\u2019all<\/em>).<\/p>\n Sometimes the journey includes camping out at your line sisters\u2019 college apartments to watch classic Black movies, eat pizza and gumbo, drink wine and whiskey, and shed the occasional and sometimes very necessary sets of tears. Sometimes it’s going to church and feeling at home. Sometimes it\u2019s getting involved with a group of people who commit to spend a week of their summer volunteering with a youth program, who have a knack for seeing the world in you before you\u2019re able to see it in yourself.<\/p>\n For many of us who have had these or similar struggles, those are foundational components of that journey. Even now, several years after I realized what going natural had taught me, I still have some days where I find myself feeling an internal tug back to those old feelings. They are few and very far between now, but rather than fall back into them I look at them as a reminder of how far I\u2019ve come. Mostly, those days are a reminder that this journey hasn\u2019t ended. Maybe it never will.<\/p>\n Be that as it may, my steps are bigger, firmer and far more sure than before. So much so that I don\u2019t even feel the same connection to the person I used to be and the way I used to feel. Most days it feels like a totally different life. I\u2019ve grown to accept the very nerdy and fairly awkward aspects of my personality and discovered that they don\u2019t have to exist at the expense of the ratchet parts (that\u2019s called being sophistiratchet. I have a thigh tattoo and sometimes wear red weave, but I also have a couple degrees and am ridiculously interested in hip hop pedagogy and the fresh possibilities it presents for engaging in liberatory praxis for people working with the Black community and students of color in higher education spaces<\/em>).<\/p>\n I can joke about the curves I don\u2019t have and actually be joking. I\u2019ve become comfortable standing up for others when I feel it\u2019s the right thing to do, even when it means risking being on the receiving end of a level of attention that still makes me slightly uncomfortable to receive. I\u2019m learning to be comfortable in standing up for myself, and how to distance myself from people, places, and situations that are no longer good for who I am trying to become and where I am trying to go. It\u2019s still difficult, but I\u2019m learning, and I\u2019ve decided that for this stage of my life, that is what counts the most.<\/p>\n I\u2019m currently unbothered by every single last one of those issues.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll still be listening to the old church songs that describe how our grandmothers \u201cgot over.\u201d I\u2019ll still be cooking to 90s R&B music, and getting dressed and doing my make up to trap music.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll spend a Saturday reading and watching movies based on comic books. I will get vehemently angry about policies that don\u2019t actually benefit the community. I\u2019ll combine my hip hop playlist with my Gospel playlist because I\u2019ve found that some songs make you feel closer to God regardless of the genre.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll do these things in heels, sandals, and sneakers. In sweatshirts and cocktail dresses, weaved up or hair pressed. But more than anything, I now feel comfortable and secure enough to do all of these things with day six wash-n-go curls that are only mildly tame. Because that, more than anything, reminds me of how much progress I\u2019ve made on my journey to self-love and embracing the fullness of who I am.<\/p>\n What is it about yourself or your life that you are struggling with? Acknowledge those things and commit yourself to finding a different standard to hold yourself to than society\u2019s strange brand of perfection. Write affirmations. Find your squad that will ride for you, build you up and also sharpen you. Find ways to make your body and your mind feel like the kind of home your spirit has been longing for. Live life, love hard, and most importantly, learn to love yourself on your own terms. There is freedom in that space, and we all deserve to experience it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lovingonme.com\/2017\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Whitey-profile-220x300.jpg\")
But there I was years later, okay with the fact that my curls hadn\u2019t come out perfectly because somewhere along the way to me accepting that my hair didn\u2019t need to be perfect, I began to accept that the rest of me didn\u2019t have to be perfect either. I could make decisions and go places and do things and didn\u2019t have to look, sound, or FEEL perfect.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lovingonme.com\/2017\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Whitey-Headshot-298x300.jpg\")
The truth of the matter is that I\u2019ll never be perfect. As far as some people are concerned, I\u2019ll never be feminine enough, tame enough, or chill enough. I\u2019ll never be reverent enough to social norms that serve neither women nor the Black community. For some people, I\u2019ll curse too much and work too often at things they don\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n