LIVity

During my hiatus from Blogger, I was on Tumblr, but that forum didn’t work well for my purposes. Because I’d like to compile my online writing in one spot, I’m going to republish some of those pieces here. I originally published this one on November 10, 2011:

Ladies, we need to talk about hair because a lot of you are driving yourselves insane over it. And men, I’m inviting you to the conversation because some of you are a major contributing factor to the loss of sanity.

I’ve been very fortunate to be surrounded by men who stay in their lane as far as the topic of my hair goes - they’ll talk about it if I bring it up, tell me it looks nice if it does and if it doesn’t, they say nothing. This is as it should be.

But, I’ve also had a few men who mistakenly think they’re in my circle and can comment on my hair. From these few run ins, I understand why women who allow this sort of energy around them are confused. (A very solid argument can be made that women who are pressured to react based on another’s issues with self image need to change their thinking, but I’ll leave that for another discussion.)

I wore my hair natural for much of my 20s until I decided I wanted a bob and relaxed it. I found the variation of men’s interactions with me to be, well, confused. When I would wear my hair relaxed, I’d have men come up and thank me for not having weave, very few men would approach me when my hair was natural and when I’d wear a headwrap, I’d have men come up and ask me if my hair was long. To me, this says some men are more willing to approach a woman based on fantasy than truth - we’re brown and we have our own texture of hair that most likely is not straight and/or long.

It’s still beautiful though. It’s said hair is a woman’s crowning beauty, there’s nothing in there about what texture the hair has to be. Until more people start accepting that, including our own people, women are going to keep relaxing their hair until it all breaks off or gluing/sewing/weaving somebody else’s hair in their head until all their own hair breaks off or wearing wigs and neglecting their own hair until it breaks off…sensing a theme here?? This makes as much sense as shaving your eyebrows off and creating new ones with eyebrow pencil.

I’m not advocating wearing your hair natural or relaxed or braided or whatever. All I’m saying is appreciate what you have and make your style decisions based on style, not somebody else’s perception of beauty.