during my transition I heard a lot of “You hair is too thick to be natural” and alternatively, “You’ll be fine as long as your not one of those naturals that don’t comb their hair” from people whose hair, sans perm, would look just like mine.
The natural transition period is already mentally complicated enough. You’re shedding your addiction to relaxers, straight hair, and the mental complexities that go along with accepting how you look with highly textured hair. Then add in the monkey wrench of being told that you still have to look a certain way in order to be deemed appropriate. It’s exhausting.
Literally, I’m tired of twisting my hair every.single.night in order to keep neatly arranged curls. The nerve wrecking upkeep is honestly another form of code-switching if you think about it, but this time we are code-switching for our people as well as outsiders.
After observing and absorbing all of this information I’ve found that dealing with these reactions is just the next phase in my long natural hair journey, the part that no youtube tutorial taught me about. After letting go of the practice of chemically altering your hair in order to be accepted you have to free yourself of manually altering your hair as well. My hair isn’t always in the perfect ringlet or loopy curls of a fresh twist out and it shouldn’t have to be. It has taken me a long time to get to this point but I’m happy that I have arrived.
Internally I battle with the part of me that doesn’t care if my hair is ‘presentable’ and the