HOW I WENT NATURAL

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Don’t let anyone bully you into going natural. You can have healthy relaxed hair if you take care of it just like women with natural hair do. Some people have many reasons why they went natural. Please go natural when you WANT to. It’s your hair you can do whatever you want with it.

Early Years

I don’t really remember a time when I wasn’t relaxed. In all my 20 years alive I wore my hair straight for 18 years of it. I obviously can't blame my mother for it, she did the best she could for my hair. As we know our hair is not very easy to take care of without knowing how to take care of it. The unhealthy part about having my hair relaxed was that I used to relax my hair EVERY 3 WEEKS. I still get chills when I think of it. It was like I was programmed. The minute I see undergrowth I rush to the salon to have that “fixed”. I also thought if I didn’t feel the relaxer burn my scalp then it wasn’t processed enough. Scars on my scalp after a relaxer were pretty normal.

I thought I had the healthiest hair because my hair was thick and I was still getting trims, so when I was 15 I decided to have my hair bleached and dyed for a different look. If applying a relaxer every 3 weeks wasn’t my first mistake, then dyeing my hair was. A few weeks after dyeing my hair (I had a relaxer the same day) I started to notice that my hair was very stiff and thin. I never had any problem with getting trims (hair grows) so I kept trimming and steaming hoping that I could revive the hair. I changed stylists constantly to find someone who could fix the damage but no one could. In the end I had to mini-chop my hair into a short bob (neck length) and grow my hair out until all the dyed hair was out.

Soon after I went to a private high school which didn’t require me to cut my hair (all my Ghanaians understand) but it did require me to get braids. For the next 3 years my hair was constantly in braids so tight it snatched all my edges away. My hair felt like it never grew. If anything it got shorter even though I was still relaxing it every time my hair wasn’t in braids.

There was this one girl in school with me who in our first year had short natural hair (TWA). I wasn’t particularly paying attention to her hair until I started worrying about being unable to retain length in my final year of school. Then she passed by me and I realized she had thick, healthy and long kinky hair. I was baffled. I wondered how the heck she was able to grow her hair out while mine remain unchanged for the past 3 years. I talked to her about it and she told me about going natural if I wanted to retain length and later relax it when I’ve reached my desired length. I was intrigued so I did what any confused teenager would have done: went on YouTube.

I saw so many beautiful women rocking their gorgeous Afro and how versatile natural hair could be. But I was scared I couldn’t bring myself to cut my hair afraid of what people around me might think. Still, i knew if I wanted healthy long hair I had to start somewhere. I started to reduce the amount to times I got a relaxer from 3 weeks to every two months.

I remember always feeling up my undergrowth and loving how it felt on the tips of my fingers. Once in a while I’d look up a few natural hair videos on YouTube and started falling in love with the kinky texture hair the women had. I wanted that. But I was still too nervous about cutting my hair.

MICHELLE SO HOW EXACTLY DID YOU GO NATURAL?!

Okay, okay I’ll tell you now. On my first try of stretching out my time between relaxers to 4 months, I walked to a salon to get my new growth relaxed. On the way I saw a beautiful woman with natural hair walking with her daughter who also had naturally textured hair styled in what I know now as a twist out. I was blown away by their beauty. I wanted that. That was when I made the decision. When I got to the salon I told the stylist “I want all my straight hair cut off” and she did just that. When she was done, I passed my hands through what was left of my hair and I knew that I made the right choice. And the rest is history….. :)

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