I Am My Hair

By: Alyssa Sibley

Growing up in suburban America where you can count the number of black kids in your classes on one hand, it was strange, if not difficult, being a black girl. The last two years of elementary school is the time in most girls’ lives when they start getting the freedom to make decisions of their own.

For my classmates, that meant what clothes they wore, the music they listened to, the type of people they would hang around, and sure, that too happened to me, but for a black girl, being in late elementary school meant I could finally choose how I wanted to do my hair.

There were so many options, many of them were styles I had already been forced to try; braids, afro puffs, the classic “press and curl.” But I wanted to be like my white classmates, so I fried my hair every morning (my mother did not know this. She assumed I was straightening once a week) in an attempt to become this effortless pin-straight type of beauty my white friends were.

It was a pathetic effort to fit in, and ended in an even more pathetic downfall. My hair started falling out. I came home crying one day when my friends pretty publicly announced that I had a bald spot on the top of my head. After a trip to the dermatologist and a beautician, my hair was chopped off.

I bawled in my mother’s bed that night after we returned from the salon. The haircut I received was adorable, but my precious locks were gone. Because of that, I hated my hair.

I had that mindset for years. I never found myself particularly ugly, I just was constantly at war with the pile of regret that sat on top of my head. I constantly apologized for the way it looked and felt whenever people wanted to touch it, and found the most pride when other people complimented it, as if every time someone said something nice about my hair, it grew an inch. In the last seven years, I have tried every single hair style imaginable with the exception of dreadlocks.

For the first four of those seven years, it was only to become beautiful by someone else’s standards. Then as high school progressed, I started to meet other black girls who took pride in the way their hair looked and I realized that there was nothing to be ashamed of. Sure my hair wasn’t long and easy to comb through but that didn’t make it any less beautiful. It didn’t make me any less beautiful. In fact, it made me proud of who I was.

India Arie sings about how we as black women are not our hair, but I’d beg to differ. We are not our hair as long as we keep believing that our hair is something to be ashamed of. I didn’t realize it then, but my hair is a reflection of me, and an amazing one at that. My hair is magic, my hair is versatile, my hair can defy gravity, my hair can grow, shrink, curl, wave.

My tresses can do whatever I say they will do, and I’d say that I could take pride in being a person who can do all the things that my hair can. My hair has put up with so much hate and conflict, and yet it still continues to be a part of me that is beautiful and deserving of love, despite my constant denial.

I learned that I shouldn’t try to prove that I am a different person than the stigma that my hair portrays, but rather be so uniquely, unapologetically me that my hair becomes an added bonus to the girl underneath it. It’s okay to be your hair, because you hair is a beautiful thing and can only make the person it belongs to even better.

When we stop apologizing for the way we are, that’s when we can be our hair. I, too, can grow and change and defy gravity, and it took that pile of beautiful disorder on top of my head to help me realize that.