Hey, y’all! Welcome to the journey that is my natural hair. I have been natural for 4 years and 5 months as of this month.**DISCLAIMER** Please excuse the picture quality (and my brows) from my natural hair journey. Forgive me for I knew not what I was doing.
THE JOURNEY: GOOD, BAD, AND UGLY
Anyways… When I started this journey, I needed an alternative to perms because my hair was breaking. I got into the natural hair game not knowing a single thing. No one I knew was natural and had no idea what a twa (teenie weenie afro) was or what it meant to transition (growing out your natural hair instead of doing a big chop). I cut it all off and was like now what??? Braids were the next logical steop for me, for the first year, because that’s what I knew to do and didn’t want to do my hair- Team Lazy Natural!
I started searching for natural hair and low and behold, I discovered an entire online natural hair community that I knew nothing about. I found websites like Curly Nikki and Black Girl with Long Hair and would spend hours at a time exploring what they were about. This led to me following YouTube vloggers like Naptural85, BlakIzBeautyful, NikkiMae2003, CharyJay (to name a few) to help me attempt different styles.
The journey has been 4 long years of trying to figure out what the hell I was doing with my hair, including both hair growth and hair breakage. But, I think at this point in my journey, I have finally found my rhythm and no one can tell me nothing! My hair is flourishing; it’s healthy and it’s growing and that’s all I can ask for right now.
The biggest obstacle for me was understanding my texture and learning how to manage it. Being 4C, the quickest lesson that I had to learn was that my hair needs more love than the other textures and that I can’t judge my hair based on how I want it to work/look versus what it can actually do. Once I accepted this, it was smooth sailing.
I challenge everyone who is natural to embrace your hair for what it can do and get rid of the expectations that you have.
How has your natural hair journey been for you? Challenging? Easy? Tell me more!
As always, thanks for stopping by!
This post was originally published in 2016 and was updated/recirculated for 2020.
Love hate relationship!!! But I will it give up
I completely understand that relationship. It’s definitely up and down for me. But you’re giving up already?!?
I love love love my natural hair. I do miss my TWA!! Like you, I did the big chop and I bought books about the science of hair. Kimmaytube was my YouTube inspiration. I’m very simple when it comes to my hair. I don’t have hair A. D. D. ??. I find a style that I like and is manageable and I stick to it. My hair speaks to me and when I learned to listen to her likes and dislikes, we have become great friends. I only wish I had found her sooner!!!
Love it! It took me a while to learn to listen to my hair. But as soon as I figured that out, it was like a light switch turned on!! Glad that you are enjoying your natural hair journey.