This Isn’t About My Hair (Except It Is)
This is my version of saying hair is everything.
It might be a stretch to say my life mirrored my hair, but lately, both feel free, finally. And that’s something. This is, in my own way, my version of saying hair is everything.
Because for most of my life, it wasn’t.
I didn’t grow up loving my hair. I grew up negotiating with it, taming it, twisting it, straightening it, cutting it off in chunks of frustration. Not curly enough to claim the curls, not straight enough to fall in line, just stranded somewhere in the wild middle. Messy. Unruly. Unbrushed and misunderstood. I spent years trying to make it look like someone else's.
I’ve wasted hours scrolling through Pinterest for frizzy hair inspo, short hair hairstyles, anything that looked remotely like me. But it never did. It was always far from it. No matter what I tried, nothing worked. My hair just stayed the same. Nothing changed. Or maybe everything did, but not my hair.
I just want to remind you, this is not about my hair not being “long and shiny”. It is about me not being able to appreciate it. It’s deeper than insecurity. I just didn’t know how to take care of it, because I didn’t know how to care for something that felt so outside the box of what was “right.” 1
I spent so long copying other people’s routines. Living inside other people’s definitions of beauty. Of femininity. Of control. Of worth. But you can’t hack your way into self-acceptance. You can’t DIY your way into peace with something you never gave a chance to just be.
And it turns out, I didn’t need to change it. I needed to stop expecting it to be anything but mine.
It took time. God, it took years. But my hair didn’t change, I did. I stopped asking it to apologise for existing. I set it free. And weirdly, that set me free.
Now, every day is a good hair day, not because it’s perfect, but because I finally don’t need it to be.
Time has this sneaky way of making you love what you used to loathe. I had to wait until I was 22. Maybe if I hadn’t hated my hair all these years, I wouldn’t be writing this. Maybe I’d have just hated something else and ended up here anyway, under a different title, unravelling another thread of misplaced shame.
Because this isn’t really about my hair. But also, it absolutely is.
There, she blames it on the system again.