How Does It Make You Feel When People Don’t Approve of the Texture of Your Hair?
What do you say?
What do you do?
Truthfully, it makes you feel like something is wrong with your hair… and sometimes something is wrong with you.
Your hair is different from every other race of people, so you start feeling embarrassed to wear it naturally. You don’t feel pretty because it doesn’t look like what society told you beauty should look like.
You feel like you have to fit in.
You feel like you’re not accepted by others—even by some people who look like you.
So questions start to form in your mind:
Why is it so coarse and tangly?
Why is it so hard to manage?
Why does it have to hurt when I comb it?
Why doesn’t it seem to grow as long or as fast as others?
Why won’t it just lay down and behave?
Why couldn’t I have straight, silky hair?
Then you give in to the pressure.
The pressure of not wanting to stand out because of your natural hair.
The pressure of the looks.
The comments telling you to “do something with your hair.”
The label of “nappy.”
The feeling that natural means unattractive.
So what do you do?
You straighten it by whatever method you grew up with—or whatever method you discovered works best for your hair and lifestyle.
A straightening comb.
A relaxer.
Flat irons.
A wrap.
A blow dryer.
Whatever it takes to gain control of the “naps.”
But if we’re honest…
Isn’t it exhausting?
Isn’t it humiliating to feel like you have to fight against a part of yourself just to feel accepted?
To spend years trying to change something that naturally belongs to you?
To imitate the very standards that first told you your hair was ugly?
No judgment at all, because I was deep in those same lies myself.
I couldn’t go 30 days without relaxing my hair before any amount of new growth showed up. That’s how much I wanted to erase what naturally grew from my scalp.
So I understand the struggle.
But I also understand freedom.
And freedom begins the moment you stop seeing your natural hair as a problem—and start seeing it as part of your beauty.
