My mom had complete artistic direction over my hair when I was a child. Every morning until I was about 10, she would go to town braiding and twisting my hair into elaborate designs while I sat in front of Jimmy Neutron and Fairly Odd Parents, eating fruit and an English muffin. My hair occupied little to no space in my mind back then. Yes, it annoyed me that none of the American Girl Dolls had hair like mine, and yes, I picked up on the fact that all the nerdy characters on TV had curly hair, but I never internalized it, it was never about me. If anything, I was riding high on the childhood comparisons to Shirley Temple that had been thrown at me for as long as I could remember.
Unfortunately, when I hit puberty I decided that I was ugly. Straight hair and big butts were in (they’re still in) and I lacked both. The butt I couldn’t change (I did look into underwear with butt pads), but I could fix the hair. I had no clue how to style it at the time though, which left it in frizzy coils most days. Classmates would constantly play with it during school, stretching out the curl and letting it bounce back up like a spring. It annoyed me, but I let it happen because I wanted to be cool. It didn’t help that my eyebrows seemed to be dying to get to know one another, stretching across my brow to try and shake hands.
I would literally get angry with my parents – why didn’t you two have me ten years earlier, when curly hair was cool? In a sad attempt to switch up my look, I decided to get a bob the summer going into 5th grade. I liked how I didn’t have to spend hours untangling my hair, but I looked like a Q-tip and hated it. I wanted a wig like Miley had in Hannah Montana. She was a nobody with her brown curly hair and a pop star without it for Christ’s sake!
That’s when Q-tip Cara entered sixth grade with a three-year long crush on a boy from my school. Our last names were close in the alphabet, so we would often be in the same homerooms and advisory groups, flirting as awkwardly as sixth graders could. Towards the middle of the year, we decided it was time to become official boyfriend and girlfriend, but he had one stipulation- I had to straighten my hair more often, if not all the time. I was slightly offended, but also completely understood where he was coming from. If the Princess Diaries had taught me one thing, it was that a hair straightener was essentially the key to becoming a hot, popular princess, and I wanted nothing more.
So it was a throuple. Me, my crush, and my Remington Wet 2 Straight hair straightener. When I eventually broke up with him two weeks later, right before choir practice, Remington and I stayed together and he became my sole lover. Every morning, I would cherish my time with him- running through my wet, curly hair with a steady stream of smoke billowing up above me. And we didn’t use protection – Remington would burn my hair to a crisp nearly every morning without a lick of heat damage product in sight.
Remington and I went our different ways, but he was replaced by endless successors. It became an obsession of mine, the process of straightening my hair. It was like giving myself a nose job or doing my makeup, it provided me with a superficial sense of control throughout and beyond my teenaged search for acceptance. My curly hair slowly became my deepest, darkest, most badly-kept secret. Yes – you could see the roots and skipped-over back pieces, but there was no denying my hair was oily, pin-straight.
I wish I could say I grew out of it in high school, and learned that, actually, my individualities are what makes me special, but NOPE. No way. I straightened my hair throughout high school and college every single day – and I went to college humidity-ville, South Florida. Doing my hair was the same as putting on shoes before leaving the house in my mind, a non-starter, an absolute essential. Wearing my hair curly would risk other’s perceiving my biggest weakness, my fatal flaw. My self-hatred was so baked into my mind that when I would see girls with similar hair texture to mine, I would feel superior because I straightened my hair and they didn’t. I had found a way out of our condition while they suffered.
I know this sounds delusional. My hair was over my shit too. In tenth grade, I tried to pull out a strand of hair for whatever reason, but had trouble finding a piece that wouldn’t snap in half with the slightest pull. I had given up my dream of long hair, the damage prevented it from growing past my shoulders until I turned 26 years old. I was fine with it though, a trade off that had to be made in order to maintain my straightening routine.
I even shipped a flat iron to rehab. Admissions mistakenly sent me the packing list for the teen program, which forbade hair tools (along with razors, band tee shirts, and pens) so I arrived without my trusty straightener. I was okay without it, honestly I was too focused on detoxing and disassociating the first couple weeks to notice. Towards the end of my stay however, I was stable enough to hyper-focus on my hair again. During my allotted phone time, I Amazon Prime’d a flat iron, and nearly blew a fuse straightening my hair one time. I wanted to prove to myself I was the same person sober, and weirdly enough, straightening my hair on a summer day in rural Pennsyvania served as a comforting reminder of ‘myself’.
It wasn’t until I got Covid in 2022 that I decided to let my hair go curly for a consecutive week. I was in early sobriety and still coming to terms with the damage my addiction had caused -I basically felt bad for everything, including my hair. I knew the abuse it had endured at my hands, and I felt I owed it a vacation. It was based in vain though, my hair was at the point where no amount of oil or wax could hide the breakage. Shockingly, I didn’t see much of a difference in my split ends and broken pieces within the week I allotted it to heal, so I decided to extend the practice for a few more weeks. I set a reminder on my phone for a month, when I had given myself permission to straighten it again.
Wearing it out naturally was like exposure therapy. Friends that have known me for years were shocked to find out my hair was ‘that curly!’ I spent weeks excusing it, as though it was a swollen boil on my face that would go away soon. Anxiety slowly gave way to a wave of relief though, as the small stresses that came with straightened hair slipped away. No more worrying about hairline sweat, frustrated low ponies, crimps, and moisture. It wasn’t that the internalized voice screaming in my head – you’d look way better if you straightened your hair– disappeared, I just learned to not trust it anymore. I entered the reality I had feared for so long – and no one gave a fuck besides me. How world shattering it was for me to realize the level of power I gave an idea about my hair, how I had restricted myself for so long because of my own shallowness and self-hatred.
It was like nursing someone on the brink of death back to life – nearly impossible. My hair would barely stay wet, soaking up any water it came into contact with. Within the first month I acquired a silk bonnet and micro-fiber towel, two of my most loyal tools to this day. A slow rotation of curly, anti-frizz products began to circulate in my apartment. It was all trial and error, but I kept trying. I made it two months without touching a styling tool, then decided to straighten it once – just to see the progress. It felt like a relapse, and I set another reminder on my phone three months in the future- when I could straighten it again, but didn’t pick up a heat tool for the next year.
I never planned on tackling this insecurity, it just kinda happened. Maybe it was my frontal lobe developing, maybe it was my increasing self-awareness, I don’t know exactly, but I ended up changing a habit that I saw myself carrying throughout my entire life. What inspires change for me, I’ve realized, is ease. If I am shown an easier way to exist in the world, I take it. It comes back to the hypothetical I hear throughout my recovery – how free do you want to be? Change is daunting, yet it’s surprisingly easier than keeping destructive habits. Change also requires honest self-analysis and the ability to question whatever ‘foundational truths’ I learned growing up – namely that I was ugly and unloveable, and my curly hair made it worse.
Frankly, today I could walk down the street and be perceived as the ugliest motherfucker on the block and not give a damn, because I think I’m hot. How refreshing it is to place value on my own thoughts instead of others’. I can count the amount of times I used a straightener / blow dryer for an entire year on one hand. I might even achieve the once-unattainable goal I held dear as a 12-year-old – my hair being long enough to cover my boobs. Is it corny to say I love my hair now? I don’t care if it is – clichés are cliché for a reason! I actually think it completes an outfit, it’s like a built-in accessory that changes everyday.
If you’re reading this, confused as to why hair kept me tormented for years, I get it, but everyone has their version of curly hair- something that we can’t change, yet fight against our entire lives. When you go to war with yourself, you are the only person getting injured. Our capacity for change is endless, but rejection and failure taunt us out of taking action. I just wish I could’ve told little Cara that, I would’ve given her a big hug and handed her some Kérastase. She would’ve loved it.
