...Okay, still no pictures. Especially in this post, which chronicles the evolution of my hair and its styles, they'd be helpful. I promise that soon, I will dig through the archives and--shudder--face my scanner. (It's slower than, how do you say, hair that refuses to grow after a botched cut! Seriously.)
Oh what torture I put my hair through. But really, I had no guidance. Think about it. How many fashion magazines have you or do you read where, sure they claim to talk about curly hair, but actually- it's some imposter whose fabulous stylist uses hot-rollers to feign an all-too-perfect curl-like look? (...Similar to that hot-chick/nerd-in-disguise-stunt the movies pull: thank you "She's All That" and "Easy A"...both of which I love! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160862/, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160862/.) Truthfully, I've grown-up with air-brushed, steam-rollered fakes, modeling for me what could never work on finely textured, tightly curled, voluminous hair. Not the products they use nor the techniques they teach could tame these tresses. So, I did the best I could given what I had...
IDENTITY CRISIS:
I can honestly say that the earliest memories of my hair pre-date the nocturnal-praying/begging-sessions of yesteryear. In 1990 and 1991 when I was in Kindergarten (maybe a year before my exorcism-of-the-curls), I vividly recall a clammy, green leather chair that, ironically, juxtaposed the Emerald green walls surrounding it. Though within its natural environment, this beast sat a part from it. Gigantic, cold, grown-up: this chair wanted to eat me. It wanted to eat my hair. Helpless I sat as tufts of dried-up snarl floated from neck to shoulders, stopped to hover around arms, and pitifully, found its resting spot upon the wooden beams that supported us. (They were green too.) But I'm not a boy, I thought quizzically, staring into the square-shaped mirror the stylist held in front of me. I'm not a boy. In his infinite wisdom, my father asked to have my curs lopped-off. Not at the shoulder... But at the neck. The neck! ...Twice!! He did this twice! The second time I remember thinking, resignedly: Again??? Even then I could sense the ironic humor. ...How my mom let this happen, with hair curlier than mine!, I'll never know... (Well, she was in college, full-time, to become a chemical engineer, so... Some things fell by the wayside. Manely--haha--my hair.)
STRAIGHT-PHASE & PARFAITS:
If God didn't lend a hand, I'd eventually take things into my own. Throughout the rest of grade school, I grew my hair long--rarely cutting it--and mostly, I tried the brushing-it-straight-while-it-was-still-wet "technique." ...This went over well. I styled my hair into a giant parfait-gone-wrong: tight curls like raisin nuts bolstered the bottom, looser curls like messy swirls of fruit suspended in yogurt comprised the middle, and teased-out "straight" pieces--shredded wheat, if you will--lingered on top. All of the elements for all of the wrong flavors. ...Scrumptious. By the time I got to 6th grade, my mom and I tried an at-home relaxing cream. All burning around neck and ears aside, this almost worked! For the greater part of 1997, my hair relaxed into manageable waves so that I could actually leave it down ...at least in winter. Yet as my roots grew back and as summer approached, my hair ushered in a new-era. A new reign.
MONOTONY:
For the entirety of my adolescence, including junior high, high school, and an eighth of college, for the larger part of the next decade, for every single day from 1997 to 2004, I wore my hair the same way. (Okay...save for prom and ball...and school picture day. Regardless.) Freshly shampooed and conditioned daily (not healthy!), slicked-back (river-rat), tied-up in the back-center of my head ('80's/stuck-in-a-missed-childhood-of-hair-styling), and endlessly scrunched (obsessive) until tight curls fell past my neck and stopped at my shoulders: for 7 years, I wore my hair one way. The pony way. It wasn't until the second semester of my freshman year at college when I realized that I wanted to look like a college student. Not the-girl-who-got-to-visit-her-big-sis-student. Finally, I began wearing my hair down. One problem: I tortured it.
TORTURE:
Still, I shampooed my hair daily. Or almost daily. (Not healthy for curly, or even dry, hair .) To style, I drowned it mountain-upon-mountain of mousse-globule, and really I willed it to be straight by tugging at every single curl rather than gently cradling them into place. Worse: I never cut it! If anything, my mom trimmed it every year or so. HORRIBLE. Shamefully enough, this never truly changed until this past summer... (I mean, I began getting more regular cuts by a professional. But it wasn't until June '10 that I began regular cuts with a curly-hair specialist. So embarrassing...). On the whole, for the next 6 years of my life from 2004 until 2010, I suffered from hair that I never fully wore down, that broke very easily, that housed its own Sahara right in the back of my head, and whose silhouette formed the stereotypical-triangle so that even when I wore it half-up, half-down, I always pulled it back. ...This led to what I call "colonial man" syndrome. How did I ever date?
FREEDOM:
That was probably the worse part about my hair. I never felt like I could just leave it. Always, it had to be styled, and even then, it had to be hyper-styled so that, somehow, it maintained shape. You know how some girls can just get out of the shower and leave their hair? It doesn't always look fabulous as it dries, but it can be left? I couldn't do that. Or some girls can style their hair, but keep it down. Nothing in it. Free of pins and clips and ties and plastic and metal? Free. Not mine. Mine was always encaged. Tangled. A prisoner of its own tangles. I hated that. I hated feeling trapped. What will I do when I'm too busy for this? How will I handle it when I live with someone else ...a guy? Why can't it just be easier, more natural? These questions seem frivolous, like nothing to get worked-up about. But when they occur every day and when they denote every day for every successive day, they are daunting. Cumbersome. I had me some cumbersome curls. Next post, I'll explain how I broke-free. ...
Thanks for reading!
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