The relationship I have with my hair is very intimate.
Out of all my self-care, my hair is what I spend the most time and money on, probably because it’s the thing I care about the most.
Hair has always been a strong element of identity for me but I only remember embracing it in its natural state during my last year of high school.
I relaxed my hair at age 13, not because I felt pressured to do it but because everyone around me was doing it. I simply saw it as the next thing to do and didn’t realise how bad it was for my hair. Some time afterwards I decided to cut it.
My mother is a lover of me having long hair so she didn’t really understand my decision to cut my hair very short, eventually to grow my natural hair back.
She wasn’t supportive of me cutting my hair but she definitely was supportive of me embracing my natural hair.
Going natural is such a learning experience. Once you cut your hair you really need to educate yourself when it comes to what your hair needs and unfortunately this wasn’t something I could get from my mother as she didn’t know how to take care of such hair type. Even simple things like combing it needed to be learned. It’s a process that is full of discoveries.
Internet helped a lot obviously. I wouldn’t have imagined that one day I would have been able to search ‘how to do twists’ on Google and actually find relevant results!
I never felt the need to fit in.
I am mixed race, went to international schools across the globe: Tanzania, Zambia, Ethiopia, Nepal and many others. I always stood out but also got raised by parents who never talked about race or differentiation.
I wouldn’t say it was a sheltered upbringing but it simply reflected the fact that for both my parents these things don’t matter and therefore never became topics of conversation.