Why you want long hair anyways?

NFL player Troy Polamalu

Correction...
I don't want long hair, I want to know that I have the option of having long hair.
Contrary to what most people might think my hair journey is not a vanity project. I'm not trying to get hair down my waist so I can swing it and show off to people just how beautiful I think I am. That's not the purpose of this journey (and documenting it) in the slightest.
If you're a woman (or even a man) of African descent then I gather that you're familiar with the kind of attributes usually assigned to the hair that we have supposedly been "cursed" with: 

Unruly

Hard 

Rough

Unmanageable

 Nappy

Ugly

also kinky and coarse but the negative connotations of the words. However, those words are usually used to describe the hair in its natural states. And for many black women the solution to taming that wild mane of hair was the relaxer, "relaxing" the natural tightly curled or coiled texture to a straight one. And like clockwork, every number of weeks or every time the unruly natural hairs began to show themselves again, we would relax those hairs again making them bone straight. Now don't get me wrong, this is not a relaxed hair bashing, which would be contradictory considering the fact that I'm relaxed, this is just to demonstrate the sort of negative stereotypical thinking that tends to surround Afro-textured hair. And even in it's relaxed state, the hair is bashed for the fact that being chemically treated it is devastatingly unhealthy. But commonality shared between relaxed and natural afro-textured hair is that this "unfortunate" type of hair that we have just won't grow. And consequently we black women are reduced to wearing weaves to hide the shame of our hair and achieve lengths that are thought to be impossible given our race.

So many misconceptions surround afro-textured hair, it's amazing and the purpose of my hair journey is to shatter each and every one of them, particularly the one about the misfortune about the nature of the hair and about growth. My goal is to discard those myths that have surrounded afro-textured hair and kept us from appreciating the hair in all its states whether natural, relaxed, texlaxed, whichever way you choose to wear it. Because of the misconceptions about Afro-textured hair, most of the methods employed in taking care of the hair, for the most part, are damaging which have in turn kept the hair from flourishing the way it naturally should. And I have every intention of rectifying that for myself.

And I believe that if I'm successful, I believe it will be be somewhat beneficial to the race as a whole.Yes, the negative stereotypes about afro-textured hair have been used to put down the race quite often for example the misconception that if a black girl has long hair she HAS to have some other race mixed in there. Because the girl couldn't have such a heralded trait (yes for the most part long hair is prized throughout the world) "being black" alone. Or the aforementioned fact about weaves being a desperate substitute for the hair we can't have.

And it's not as serious as it sounds. I know that hair is just that--hair. I've been taking care of my hair (the wrong way) for as long I can remember, and so have most people out there (i.e. we all wash it and style either ourselves or we go to the salon). The only difference now is that I'm actually taking care of it in a way that is actually beneficial to the hair. And I believe the benefits would show and inspire others.

Like I said before, I don't want long hair, I want to know that I have the option of having long hair. So I'm going to keep along on my journey to give myself that option.

In the Beginning...December 2009

 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.