I went all natural

Hair is care. Hair is community. It breaks and forgives. It teaches every lesson about self care and the consequences of not tending to yourself. It is something we take care of our entire lives. It demands our attention, discipline, compassion, admiration, and exploration.

Our hair is not a third party. It is a living and breathing example of our health, our wellness, our desire to play, and our willingness to center ourselves.

There is an intimacy we have with our hair that exists in tension with the way it is publicly perceived. It is not an uncommon experience for us to be fetishized, treated as spectacle, something to be touched or examined,often with little regard for the person it is attached to.

It should be straighter

It should be smaller

It should be longer

It’s too voluminous

It’s too dry

It’s distracting

It seems like EVERYbody got an opinion, an assumption, advice, some lore about our hair that is rooted in something deeper than they admit. It’s one of the first ways the world interacts with us and determines our value and professionalism. Our ability to hide it well determined how well we were treated. From a young age we’ve been taught that our hair can speak for us and be easily misunderstood. It is a problem to be fixed. And therefore we were responsible to suppress it, control it, tame it, put out its fire no matter the impact on our sense of self.

Our relationship with our hair can reveal our relationship to control. There exists a multimillion dollar industry that profits by telling us that something is wrong with our hair and that it is our responsibility to fix it only by consuming more products that have severe consequences.

Despite that we are choosing

To learn our hair

To listen to the lessons it is trying to teach us

To invest the time and community it takes to tend to it

To muster up some discipline for the sake of our well being

To let our hair roam free.

Mantra #27:

I can learn to have a healthy relationship with my hair.

My hair is not something to be controlled, it is something to learn and be a student of.

I can love my hair through its transformation.

For Your Consideration: What’s one kind word you want to say to your hair today?