It's My Natural Hair and I'm...Hating it Right Now

Okay, so it's after midnight, I have to get up and go to the office tomorrow, and I'm sitting up stewing over my hair. I'm not liking it very much right now at all.

My hair is natural and has been for the past five years or so. Most of the time I love it. Well, let me quit lying...most of the time, I like it a whole, whole lot. Some of the time, I love it. But this is certainly not one of those times.

A little background here; going natural was not a conscious decision for me. I didn't do a big chop (aka cutting off all the relaxed hair), nor did I purposely transition (aka growing the relaxed hair out until nothing but the natural goodness is left). My hair was relaxed but I would at times get kinky twists or braids to give myself a break. Well, I wore kinky twists for two years without getting touch-ups in between and come 2008, when I was getting ready to start a new job, I didn't have the money to get them re-done and all my relaxed hair had completely grown out. So I had a head full of natural hair that I had absolutely no clue what to do with. I remember standing in the mirror the morning I was supposed to start the job and just looking at it helplessly. I hadn't been natural since I was a child, and then, my hair was my Mama's problem, not mine. So I had no idea what I was supposed to do with my big head full of thick, coarse, dense hair. After a while I managed to pin it up into what I considered a presentable-enough style, but I felt like Vanessa Huxtable from The Cosby Show when she had that boxy afro thing (think about the episode where she thinks her boyfriend Roy wanted to break up with her). Except she probably liked hers like that; I hated mine.

Over time I've gotten better at how to deal with my hair, though I admit it's only been in the last year or so that I really started trying to learn how to take care of it. And it's evident in the growth, or lack thereof; it's grown since 2008 but not nearly as much as you would think it would in five freakin' years. And now that I'm actually trying, actually watching YouTube videos and reading blogs and articles and making sure I drink enough water and being mindful of the products I use and trimming my ends and all that, it seems like it's not doing me any good. My hair can be some of the most frustrating stuff in creation. There are days when I absolutely love it, so much so that I hate to mess it up at the end of the day. Like when I have the perfect afro puff.

But then...there are the days when I want to just cut it all off and start over. It is some of the most uncooperative strings of protein I've ever had to deal with. My bathroom looks like a small section of the natural hair aisle at Walgreens because I've been trying so many different things; I even joined a natural hair group and went to a product swap so I wouldn't keep spending money on more products but would hopefully come across what works best for my hair. No such luck.

My hair literally just soaks up whatever I put in it, so it often looks and feels dry. And I drink plenty of water and watch what I eat (well, most of the time). My ends often look scraggly. I can never really think of what to do with it; I have a very limited repertoire of hairstyles. As creative as I am when it comes to writing books, none of that translates to hair styling (probably a good thing I didn't continue with my cosmetology career, huh? Though natural hair wasn't nearly as big back then as it is now). Just about every time I try something new, it never works and I end up going back to my fallback afro-puff. But my biggest issue with my hair is, it just seems like it WON'T FREAKIN' GROW! (Or it just seems like it isn't). This can be incredibly, incredibly frustrating to someone who actually wants their hair to get longer.

So...back to why I'm so frustrated on this particular evening. I had wanted some more kinky twists last week but wasn't able to get them. I had been watching several YT videos on doing your own twists and figured, hey, this doesn't look so difficult...I have four packs of hair in my trunk...I'll try it! If I manage to pull it off, it will save me a ton of money 'cause I'll be able to put them in whenever I want to and it'll only cost me about twenty bucks (as opposed to the hundred that I usually pay). Well, I wanted to wash and deep condition my hair first, but that got scratched when it was after nine by the time I finished working out and cooking dinner. So I opted to just blow it out first instead, which is something I never do. Not good. Then I began trying to practice the technique I had seen on the multiple videos I had watched. I managed to get one twist done, though I had to redo it 'cause half of it looked like crap. I tried it again a couple more times and then threw the hair down in frustration. I didn't expect to get it perfectly right on the first try, but I figured my cosmetology background would kick in and I'd get the hang of it after a couple of tries. Well, I didn't. I ended up just putting it in four big two-strand twists and banding it, like I usually do. Ho-hum.

Sooo....there it is. I hate my hair right now. And I felt the need to sit up for an hour blogging about it.

I'm going to bed. Here's to a good hair day tomorrow.