Inside Out ANNM: Challenge 1 by Natasha S. Houston
The topic of damaged hair is something that is very familiar to many African American women and even young girls. I remember all the Saturdays I spent as a little girl sitting with my grandmother while she pressed my hair. The end result was a little girl with bony knees running around with tight, sleek locks. The experience included everything from cowering in the heat to jumping out of the chair because the hot combs seemingly accidentally missed my hair and touched my scalp. Needless to say, this is a childhood memory that I would rather not dwell on too often.
Like most little girls growing up, I now realize that my self-esteem took a hit early on. My idea of what was beautiful did not include accepting myself in my pure form. I had learned from a very early age from various sources that frizzy hair was unattractive. When I outgrew the pressing and curling that always lost out to the natural elements and the daily activity of a child’s life, I turned to Kids Relaxer, a new way of straightening.
The little girl on the box looked so pleased with her straight hair. I was sure I would be just as pleased with the results. I quickly learned that the commercials that boasted about straightness, volume and shine failed to mention what happens when the chemicals are too strong for your hair. And there was even more failure on the part of people who failed to mention that your hair could simply fall out if the chemicals were left in for too long. No one told me about the scars on your scalp, weak spots in your hair or that your hair is getting thinner. Straight hair was what I saw on television. What was a little girl supposed to think? All the Barbie dolls I played hairdresser with had long straight hair. At the time, no one around me wore her hair with natural curls. The media was subconsciously sending messages that straight was the way to go.
My mother and grandmother had no idea at first that these treatments were robbing my hair of its strength. They were just passing on to me what they had learned and what had been done to them. And that is how it has often been in other families.
It wasn't just my hair that was being stripped of its strength. My sense of self was being damaged just as much as my hair and scalp. I had an extremely distorted sense of beauty that they supported.
Growing up, if it wasn’t the relaxer that caused my hair to break, it was the stress of extensions that caused a receding hairline, damaged temples, and hair loss. High school was a cycle of micro braids, glue-on extensions, and relaxers. I endured a vicious cycle of these hairstyles from high school through my freshman year at Hampton University. The cycle before my follicle liberation was one of chemicals and touch-ups that would eventually lead to repeated trips to the salon to get my hair cut short. My way of dealing with broken hair was to cover it up. I felt that any method of hiding the damage was acceptable. My self-approved solutions only tended to add to the damage. It wasn’t until later that I understood how it all fit together.
So many women and people in general do external things to cover up internal problems. Why did I put up with all this damage to my hair? It is complex and simple at the same time. When we have an internally damaged image of ourselves, we tend to put up with painful external things. This goes beyond just hair. Hair and several other aspects have the ability to communicate how we see ourselves from many different angles. I came to the conclusion that the damage my hair was going through was mainly internal damage.
As a little girl, I was influenced from the outside world regarding “beauty”. Although I know my family loves me very much, no one can teach you self-love if they don’t have it for themselves. They supported these attempts to conform because, deep down, they had the same defining factors of beauty as society. I call it “society’s perception of beauty”. Unfortunately, frizzy hair is not part of that perception. So my ideology was shaped by my family and society.
My journey to embrace my natural curls came after years of wondering what I would look like with natural hair. When I decided to start this journey in 2007, it became a beautiful spiritual experience. I had once again encountered a situation of broken hair due to over-processing. And this time, there was absolutely nothing I could do to hide it. My hair was already short. And that’s when I decided enough was enough. Even before it became a trend, I had this desire to be as natural as possible. But to be completely honest, I was afraid of it for years. I was literally afraid that my hair wouldn’t be pretty or that I would be ugly. This in itself was a form of self-hatred that I needed to be freed from. When I declared that I wanted to be able to…