The next day, I searched online for information, tips, advice and was OVERWHELMED by the idea of it all. The blogs, the photo journeys on Fotki, the youtube videos. All of a sudden the idea of it sounded a lot less like, “I should have cornflakes for breakfast…” and a lot more like, “I should move to Guam and raise free range chickens for the rest of my life.”

I have no clue why a month ago, I thought this would be some easy decision. I think that I just thought… I thought that for so long, I have not liked “me”. All my life in fact. Which is random because my friends tell me they like me, and my parents like me, and my sister likes me, and the dude I’m currently kissing in the mouth with tongue likes me, even strangers sometimes like me. But for as long as I can remember, I haven’t liked me most days. I’m too this. I’m not enough that. I should be more here and less there. I’m a fraud. I’m not who I portray. I’m a loser. As an adult you start to kind of smack yourself in the face as if to say, WAKE UP! WHY DO YOU NOT LIKE YOURSELF! WHAT IS THE BIG FLIPPING DEAL THAT MAKES YOU CONSTANTLY DEGRADE YOU!

I’ll probably spend tons in therapy trying to figure that out one day. At any rate, I am trying my best to learn to like me more. And one of those journeys just naturally begins (for me at least) with hair. I like relaxed hair, don’t get me wrong. I’ve had relaxed hair forever. I’ve always thought long, healthy, flowy hair was pretty. But I’ve come to realize that beyond me thinking that relaxed hair is pretty, I now think that I’m UGLY without it. My mom pressed my hair when I was really young and gave me my first relaxer probably when I was 10 or so. I believe she has always felt that “relaxed hair” was nicer than natural hair. So it’s just the way I was brought up. But now I feel like, well what’s so wrong with my own hair? What’s so wrong with letting it just be how God purposed it to grow out my head? I feel like I felt it was “wrong” somehow so I needed a relaxer to “fix” it, or tame it, or something like that. But maybe it’s not supposed to be tamed?

And the more I had these thoughts and the more pictures I found of beautiful, gorgeous, curly, coily afro-ed BIG HAIR, the more I just fell in love with it. I don’t even know what MY REAL hair really looks like. But I feel ready to find out. And hopefully grow more of an appreciation for ME.

And I guess all that would be okay, if I weren’t so shallow, but I am. The sad fact of it is, (and brace yourself here folks):

I know, how very “Hollywood” of me. More importantly, I care what MEN think. And the biggest fear I have of going natural is that men will find me unattractive. Because I don’t have the OVERTLY FEMININE FACE and PETTITE FRAME I see on some of these naturals to pull off such a non-European hairstyle. One person said because of my boxy frame, I’d look “like a dyke.” When I casually mentioned going natural to my mom, she said, “Eww!” And when I told my coworker, she said, “well just take into consideration the fact that you have a large head.”