Curls

I got my hair styled when I was little, sometime near 4 or 5. It was a birthday treat, and I realise, a treat for my mother who sat nightly and dealt with my squirming and cries as she worked through two feet of curl.

I can recall how the stylist didn’t pull my hair as much as my mum, but what I remember most is the stylist telling me all about how wonderful and beautiful my curls were, which I already knew. And how she wished she had hair like this, and how in a few years I’d hate them and wish my hair was straight. 

I was incensed. No, I replied with feeling, I love my hair. She and my mum shared a knowing glance and laugh between them. They didn’t get it. My hair was me.

When I was about 10, I fell in love with Toni Braxton’s voice and the music video for Un-break my heart. I sang it all the time, got her CD and played it to excess. I knew all the words by heart and never missed a chance to belt them. And I began to dream of being a singer.

Because by the time I was famous, I’d be old enough to be straightening my hair.

Where had that come from? This small footnote at the end of my dream? I hadn’t thought of that. And yet, there it was. Singers, you see, had straight hair. That much was obvious from everything around me. Performers, models in magazines – even curly styles meant hair that was actually just wavy. I had gotten the message – there was no space for my hair out there in the world.

I was almost 14, and a couple weeks from starting grade 9, when I got to have my hair straightened for the first time. All those curls, and density, gone - and suddenly I could see how small my head was. I could feel my hair blow in the wind and settle back around my face. The strands felt like silk. Seeing my reflection, I saw myself. It was like I could suddenly be all the things I dreamed of. I wanted it to last forever.

After university, I straightened my hair all the time. Curls were messy, disorderly and chaotic. They stood out in an interview and an office, and clashed with the suit and business casual that were the dress code of the world. At clubs, curls took up space and stuck out against sleek styles and cute dresses, and got weird looks from boys. They didn’t work with the image of who I was trying to be. The vision of adulthood I remembered from tv and music. A world where curls didn’t exist, didn’t belong. And as long as I had them, I wouldn’t belong. So I got rid of them. I thought belonging mattered more than being myself.

I was in my mid-20s when I walked past a girl in London who looked a lot like me, but had the biggest head of curls I had ever seen. They were glorious. They were different. They took up space without permission, and the confidence showed in her steps. It made me miss mine.

I let my hair air dry. And I noticed that even without the flat iron’s magic, I didn’t have curls. The top seemed to kink, sure, but the bottom half of my hair had lost itself. It hung straight. The middle waved. Only the roots remembered who I was.

By this time, I had discovered roller derby and learned I didn’t need to accept the must-do’s of the beauty industry without inspection. I no longer covered my skin in foundation. I didn’t need heels to go out. And I decided I would stop straightening my hair.

Someone in the office complained.

Bed head.

She looks like she isn’t trying.

That hurt.

Because I was trying. I was trying – finally – to honour myself. But my roots were curling and the ends would not, and there was nothing I could do. (Cut it, but I was attached to my long hair.) I didn’t understand; I didn’t have the picture-perfect blonde ringlets of the only other curly-headed person in the office, but they were still curls.

But no one in that office would ever understand why my hair was no longer straight every day. What “natural hair” means when you are only part-white. Or how I was struggling with myself. And so instead of asking why my curls were so shameful, I took to putting them into a bun. Every day.

Six months later, I sat in a little shop, surrounded by the chatter of black women, seeing pity in the eyes of the one trying to sort out my hair. Wrapped around a band, day in and day out, my sad curlless ends had dreaded together. You’ll have to try to comb it out yourself before I can do anything, she told me. And handed me the instrument.

I cried while I did it. Forced to acknowledge how I had treated my hair.

Again. 

Because it had dreaded a couple months before. The first time I had fixed it myself; my tears hot and angry from pain as I ripped the comb through each knot. Furious that my hair had done this to me, each rip was a punishment for its betrayal. But I got it now; I had done this to it. My hair had suffered for me. Stressed and anxious, and having daily panic attacks in the office, I had given up showing myself care.

I didn’t belong in the life I was living, and the weight of this truth was smothering. I was hiding it from work, friends - myself even - but not from my hair. I was slipping into the space between feeling and nothingness, and no one had noticed I was vanishing. Even in this room of friendship, laughter and black hair, I was invisible.

When she finished the wash and cut off what I could not save, she ran her fingers through my hair. She was shocked; You have beautiful curls, said with a bit of confusion, and envy. I nodded and paid, slipped out into the night with my hair 4 inches shorter and the ends finally curling up away from my collarbone.

Remembering the first time a hairdresser had said that to me.

And my reply.