I've decided to document my Hair journey as a part of my blog. This will most definitely ensure that it's kept active since I actively engaging with my hair on a regular basis. I've been on my hair journey for more than a year now so I can't quite restart from the beginning, I'll just repost some old blogs from last year, starting with this one from January 2010:
Ever since the "incident"--where I left my hair in braids for 3 months without touching it with anything--that led me to the knotted mess, followed by a crazy detangling process and finally a cut to ear length from shoulder length hair, I've become interested in black/afro-textured hair care. Coming from the capital of Ghana where the hair salon was walking distance and getting a nice wash and set cost about $7 (due to the difference in currency), I had always taken hair care for granted. But in 2006, I came to college in the United States and no longer had the luxury of affordable weekly salon visits and so my hair, which was relatively healthy, began to fall apart, and the idea to braid it in order to release stressing over it, ended up back firing.
I had always been relying on professionals to make my hair look "good" but once I was no longer in the salon (or my hair connoisseur friend's chair) and my hair was left in my hands, things always sort of fell apart. In August last year, I moved into Senior housing and noticed that one of the girls I lived with was always doing something to her hair; washing it every week and walking around a lot in her bathrobe and a plastic cap. Ignorant at the time I guess, I just thought she made too much of a fuss about her hair until I realized one day when she let her hair down, as she usually wore it up in a bun, that her hair was thicker and longer than I'd seen it in May when we'd had a class together. At first I thought that it was because she was of Afro-Cuban and Trinidadian descent, whilst I was African (a lot of my friends believe that our hair is too "hard" and the only reason why our hair will "never be as nice" as African American/ Caribbean people is because they have "white" blood in them).
One day she was showing me a picture of Oprah's natural hair, without the weave, on the internet on Long Hair Care Forum (LHCF) and telling me about how the site gave tips on how to grow long hair. But I didn't check it out until about three weeks ago, and then started doing research about other sites and came across Black Hair Media Forum ( BHM Talk Cafe ), Grow Afro Hair Long (I used their advice on braids maintenance) and then to a couple of youtube videos and finally to Hairlista then KISS (There are a lot more, but these are the ones I have used regularly since the start of my journey). And I must admit I am so glad I did.
Finding out information about black hair inspired me to do two things. Firstly stop relying on others to "fix" my hair and take care of it myself, and love it like I would love anything else that's mine. And secondly repel the myth that Africans have "hard," "bad" or any ugly and negative word associated with our hair (and therefore ourselves) in part of the many steps that we need to take to finally love ourselves.
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