Recently, I shared some of my running goals for the year. While this post will not be as detailed as the fitness goals, I do want to share and focus on one of my natural hair goals for the year. This year is the year that I grow my hair to waist length. I’ve done so many things to my hair during my 10 years journey. I always said I wanted to get to waist length just to see if my hair could get there. While there hasn’t been a real plan- clearly – about how I want to grow it to waist length, I decided to stop playing around and make my main hair goal to get to waist length.
This entire year, I hope to share my journey and tips and tricks of how I, hopefully, get to waist length hair by the end of this year. But before I get to how I plan to do this, I wanted to share my why and do a length check of my starting point of the year.
WHY WAIST LENGTH?
Ever since I went natural, that was the underlying goal for my hair. But I was infatuated with managing my hair rather than growing it. And the longer it gets, the less I want to deal with it. I start to get scissor happy and “trim” my hair a little too much so it stays that the length that it is currently. But I’ve now decided to make a concerted effort to put the scissors down and let it grow.
Another thing fueling this effort are all of the many microaggressions that I’ve experienced when it comes to my hair. Unfortunately, by no way intentional on our part, Black hair is political. Who knew that wearing your hair the way it grows out of your scalp would be so scandalous? So, this goal length is to not only prove to myself but also all the naysayers that claim that Black hair can’t grow.
MY PLAN TO GROW MY HAIR
My hair was mostly in protective styles because of that quarantine life. I didn’t go many places for most of the year and I worked from home so I, unintentionally, grew my hair because all I did was wash, moisturize, braid, and left it alone. Clearly, my hair loves when I leave it alone and she rewards me by thriving. So, I plan to continue in this vein. Though, I do plan to switch up my protective styles by incorporating more flattwist styles and extensions since I have more Zoom meetings and Miss Ceilie braids just won’t cut it anymore.
LENGTH CHECK
I plan to do quarterly length checks to share my progress and share what my hair likes and doesn’t during the growth process. But like any experiment, you gotta start with a baseline. So, let’s get into my length from 4 sections of my hair. I am using a tape measure to get exact measurements on my hair. Please note that these are the greatest images length of my hair because it was more difficult to show my measurements than it looks.
Note that this length check was on hair that was picked out. So, it’s not as stretched as it could be when I blow dry my hair. The first two pictures show the length of the back of my hair. As can be seen, the right side of my hair is half an inch shorter (8.5 inches) than the left side of my hair (9 inches). I can’t explain why this is the case but I’ve accepted it for what it is. The front of my hair is 10 inches and the middle of my hair 12 inches long. The middle part of my hair has always – even back to my permed days – been where my longest strands of hair are. It might be because I don’t usually manipulate it as much as I would my front and back of my hair.
I can’t wait to see the progress now that I’m being more intentional about my hair growth this year. I’ll continue to share tips and tricks that I’ve pick up along the way.
