Since the 5th grade, I’ve kept my hair almost exclusively in box braids.Before that, my mom did my hair in all the hairstyles that can only be rocked by little black girls. I never just wore my hair as it was. Most black girls don’t, for a few reasons:
Detangling is a pain for anyone, let alone a kid with no attention span and all the free time in the world to be having fun,
Black hair is quite tough to manage and for the first few years the responsibility for that tends to fall on the parents, who probably have better things to worry about,
For the past 400 or so years, the beauty ideals to which all of humanity is expected to conform have been centered around Eurocentric features outside of which there is hardly any space for young kids of color to figure out how to define their own beauty.
Don’t pretend you didn’t see that coming.
So. Yeah. Little Lota had a hard time understanding why her hair didn’t fall in silky sheets that tossed in the wind like Pocahontas (Disney Pocahontas, not real Pocahontas. I probably wouldn’t have been quite as envious of real Pocahontas had I known anything about her). What I wanted was pin-straight hair that flowed past my shoulders so I could be pretty, but I what I had was kinky, coily hair that stretched blessedly when braided but shrank back up spitefully whenever it got wet.
My situation was less than ideal.
I started getting single braids when I was 10 and got them back to back–that is, I’d undo the braids and get my hair braided up the next day–for years. All the way up until the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school. Then, excitingly, things changed! I wore my hair without extensions for the first time since elementary school! I kept it straightened, of course; people can’t just wear Afros in daily life. That would be odd.
Or something.
I eventually came to the groundbreaking realization that I’m allowed to wear my hair the way it grows from my head. So, about a year later, that’s exactly what I did. For a bit. Before going back to the braids because they were so comfortableand manageable and I was just so used to them.
(They’re also about as close as I can get to having long, straight hair without just getting a weave. But I didn’t realize this until much later.)
Another summer has passed since then and I changed my hair once again. Kind of. Specifically, I got rid of it. About a week after graduating high school, I buzzed my head. It was a refreshing experience, as I’d never actually seen myself with hair so short and it was nice to have a fresh start free from my dry, split ends. It also felt a bit like diving from an airplane without a parachute because
for the first time ever, my hair was too short to braid.
I get extensions when I’m getting single braids. But much like a kid trying to ice skate for the first time, they need something to hold on to. In cutting my hair so short I’d made a ~fun, bold choice~ (not too many girls in my suburban town were buzzing their heads), but I’d also poked a hole in all my lifeboats and forced myself to commit. To stop allowing myself to retreat and hide behind a braided curtain when the curls became too much. I was all in.
I had a good time with my short hair. For one thing, my summer was much cooler without braids trapping heat all around my head and neck. That was nice. More importantly, though, I was forced to accept myself As I Am. I had thought that that first time I went without braids meant I’d achieved maximum self-acceptance, but of course I was kidding myself. The way I took every opportunity to retreat behind my veil was evidence enough of that. Once I finally got rid of the safeguard, I grew to love my hair in a way that I hadn’t even realized I was missing out on.
In no way am I denouncing or swearing off protective styling, but I view it differently now. I got braids again several months after shaving my head and for the first time ever, I found myself missing my ‘fro after only a couple weeks of being braided up. I was eager to see how much my hair had grown while protected from the elements and my restless hands. There’s been a shift somewhere in my psyche and I no longer view the braids as a default while holding the ‘fro off as an alternative option. Ain’t no alternative, as it turns out. The ‘fro is me, and in accepting this, I draw one step closer to finally accepting myself. I’ll see y’all next time.
LØTA