Hey everyone deep post alert – let’s get started. Since I was 13, I stopped relaxing my hair. I had just moved back to London to continue secondary school and my sister had this dream that rapture was happening and it wasn’t until we cut our relaxed hair off that we were able to be raptured. Now in theory rapture is supposed to happen in a blink of an eye so there wouldn’t actually have been time to do that if it was really happening – we interpreted it as a message to us about our hair. It’s just hair right? Why let something as mundane as hair possibly stand between us and eternity? So from that day on, all three of us, my mom, sister and myself began transitioning to natural hair.
You’d think that would be enough to keep my hair natural forever? Wrong. Like the Israelites in their times of falling in and out of idolatry, I forgot everything. This was like 2006 London when Natural hair was so far from cool, and I was a little teenager still battling with culture shock and having two accents as I had just come back from 3 years in a Nigerian boarding school – having “different hair” just compounded my teenage problems and so I’d try my best to look “normal” you know, smooth, slicked hair – I wasn’t allowed a straightener so I’d iron my hair – literally with an iron. Sticking out was such a terrifying thing back then so I did all I could within my means to fit in.
Fast forward to the present day, I’ve grown a lot and I like to believe I’ve come to love myself, but sometimes I slip up. For example, I decided to straighten my hair again for the holidays. The whole time it was straight I was discontent with myself, so I sat down across the mirror and asked myself what exactly I was trying to achieve. I told myself God made you in His very own image (Genesis 1:26) and God doesn’t make mistakes. He made you with curly black hair that’s full and versatile – why change that? Was He wrong to make you like this? Never that. I’m human so of course I make mistakes but by grace I pick myself back up and try to work at my salvation. This conviction concerning Natural hair may or may not be applicable to others but I know it is to me, and so I’m making myself accountable to all my lovely readers so I don’t fall off again; truly I do love the wonderful image that God made me in – as you all should too. (Your image I mean, but feel free to love me too haha).
So to anyone out there dealing with self acceptance – because that’s what this is – I challenge you to write out everything about that thing that makes you feel self conscious and undo the words you’ve turned into facts in your mind. You think you’re forehead is too big? Who’s the forehead judge? Who made the standard that all foreheads are to measured by? No one because it doesn’t exist love, it’s all in your head. So stick a note on your mirror telling yourself the opposite of that negative thought and recite it daily till it becomes a fact – see you on the happier side 🙂
