hair | Collect Her Thoughts...

I would love to say that I have been really super hella busy…but that would be a partial lie. Yes I have been busy, but not too busy to write or blog…

So…I cut my hair on March 2nd and it is now the end of the month (the 30th). I LOVE my hair!! lol!!!! I love the freedom, the empowerment, I love the person I am.

For a moment I felt as though I had become a new person, but it’s not that I became a new person, rather it’s that I began to see the woman that I’d always been that was hiding just below the surface.

Here are a few pics and a poem…Enjoy!

(SN: I promise not to stay away so long. I’ll start posting some of the poems I’ve been working on)

The first two are the most recent…..(actually right now my hair is in long kinky twists- I’m trying out a protective style..lol)…and the other three are shortly after the BC…

I thought everything that was on my body belonged to me…or at least that’s what I thought. I have been thinking about making the leap to natural for a while now. I first considered it way back when Chris Rock’s Good Hair was released. I remember sitting in my living room, staring at the TV thinking “Oh my God, that’s what I’ve been putting on my head” as a scientist pulled a gnarled up soda can out of the canister of Sodium Hydroxide (the main ingredient of perms) it sat in for 4 hours minutes…

Feel Free to forward to 5:15 to get to the scene I’m referring to…

That image stayed with me. It has a profound effect on the way I viewed perms and relaxers…

Did I give up perms after that? Umm…no…lol. I didn’t know how to go natural, I didn’t know what people would think and I got caught up in the vanity of long hair…what in the world would I look like with short hair?? I thought people would think I had lost my mind…

Well, almost 3 years later and the yearning to go natural has not left me. I finally got the courage to go for it after a cousin and a few friends did the big chop. So with a bit of spontaneity and a lot of research (which has been really really encouraging- youtube, nikkicurly.com and naturallycurly.com have really helped) I decided to go for the big chop. I currently have relaxed hair that reaches about an inch or two below my shoulders.

I LOVE my hair. I love having long hair and the thought of short hair makes me cringe just a bit, but I have mentally prepared myself for this…or at least I thought I had.

As I discussed this choice with my family, I was absolutely shocked at the negative reviews I received. My mother felt like I was cutting off years and years of hard work and beauty on a whim. My sister felt like I was going to completely regret it as soon as I had cut it off. My dad wanted to know what I was trying to prove…For about 10 minutes my mother and I got into a big argument about what I should do with my hair…MY hair.

The idea that “hair” should cause such anger and discussion is baffling.

Honestly, I just want to discover me. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to cry as soon as I cut my hair off…I just might. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to go through months and months of not knowing what to do with my hair…I might. What it does mean is that I will have to find what works for me and I will have to accept my hair for what it is, the way that it grows out my scalp and really realize that I am not my hair, as India Arie would say.

Will I chop on my hair off on Saturday like I had planned to?? I don’t really know…maybe I’ll opt for a long transition-or let my new growth grow until I can’t take it anymore…I don’t know.

What I do know is that my whole life I have been the girl with the hair… but my hair is only a piece of me- It’s not me.

I have about an inch or so of new growth, so if I did the big chop on Saturday my hair would be so close to my head it would probably amount to a glorified brush cut…lol…here’s my new growth…