The Hair Chronicles

I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I cut my hair for the second time. I’d been natural twice before. The first time from birth until the universe finally bestowed some creamy crack upon my scalp, the second time when I cut it when I was 15 for no reason.

By Grade 12, it was time for matric farewell and I decided to relax my hair once again and cut it short. I thought “yeah, I can manage relaxed hair from here on”. Nope. I didn’t get it. I did not at all get what other people were doing that I wasn’t that made me dislike the experience.

Once again I found myself with a pair of scissors to my mane, on an afternoon where my friend came over to do the dirty work and give me a snip. I was okay with the loss. I understood the loss, and I accepted it. Then I looked in the mirror and saw how short my own hair becomes when wet and I thought people would mistake me for a boy.

All that length you lose when you take your hair for a dip in some liquid is like magic, you watch your locks soak it right up, hold on tight and length vanishes almost instantaneously. My curls caress each other and twist and turn amongst themselves. This is 4C hair. The ‘coarsest’ your hair can be in terms of curl pattern, on a scale from bone straight 1A to kinky 4C. Which was what I have been blessed with, though fighting that shrinkage as much as possible and avoiding so called ‘wash and goes’ as best I can is what I do.

I was sort of blown away by how much hair one could have and how short it would look because of that shrinkage. Acceptance was realising that that was just the way my hair was made, and that it wasn’t necessarily more difficult to manage, if you did the right things to it. I think we’re sometimes so obsessed with having straight hair results via straight hair methods on extremely coiled up hair, that we’re bound to fail as I have before. Everyone’s hair is different, so it was up to me to figure out what made it happy and prosperous.

Still I was certain I would look like a boy because of all the length lost; I told this to my scissor yielding friend. She assured me that I was feminine enough for that fear not to have to keep me up at night, and it doesn’t.

Since then I’ve been dealing with giving myself permission to do my hair the way I want and not let it force me to feel like dressing too differently than what was within my reach and comfort zone. Gaining the confidence has been exciting. Sometimes when I have my Bantu knots on, my hair feels less than it is, and with the exposed lines of scalp at the partings catching some of the breeze, I feel almost like I have a short trim, and I like the sensation. That I could cut my hair off and I would still feel really really beautiful, that the whole idea is not impossible. It’s exciting to think I could someday be one of those women who are perfectly content with not having her mane or lack of one define her. That it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be something to brag about, but it also wouldn’t be my worst nightmare.

Some days I think about getting rid of it. Some days I feel like growing a full on Mufasa afro. Some days I want to pull off a gorgeous weave that would be long and blow in the wind, or get box braids or even relax it again. I am not bound by it. I’m not one to stress it so much.

Some days I really might do something else to my hair. Some days I really might not.