The loss happened slowly, creeping up on me month by month. It wasn’t until I took a trip down camera roll memory lane, reminiscing and sharing stories through photos, that I noticed something was different.
I looked at a picture from my senior year of high school and thought, “Wow, my hair looks really good. I wonder what routine I did.” Then I compared it with a picture from this past April, expecting to be proud of how far I’ve come, and froze.
My hair is see-through. My roots are straight, my ponytail is half the size, and my actual curls… you get the idea. These past few years had been the best, most intentional years of hair care I’d ever had, and this photo was the outcome, the fruits of my labor.
Then came summer break: three months at home in Southwest Ohio to pick myself apart. I never made it to putting myself back together.
I tried everything I could think of: protein treatments, hair masks, haircuts, no-product wash days, you name it. Nothing helped. It broke me down; I broke down.
Here I was, the girl with a curly-hair column, and my curls were literally falling out. Oh, irony, how I loathe thee. I even joked about writing this exact article to cope.
But the longer I went without answers, the harder it was to separate what was happening to my hair from what was happening to me. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know why. I mean, I didn’t even notice it was happening! At first, everyone said my hair looked the same as it always had, which only made me feel worse. I knew I wasn’t crazy. Something felt wrong, but what?
Once I noticed the problem, it felt like everything went off the deep end.
My journey with my identity has always been tumultuous, but I don’t think I’ve ever hit a low point like this past June. Not only was I a curly columnist with no curls, but I was a biracial girl with no noticeably Black features. That’s how I felt, at least.
I think my tipping point was when I tried to do braids. I’ve done them myself for the past three years to save money because no one knows my hair better than me.
I thought they’d solve all my problems. My hair would be braided so I wouldn’t have to see or attempt to style the straight roots, and I could watch the new growth come in curly to calm my fears. All I needed was to not look at it.
If you couldn’t already tell, nothing I tried went as planned, and that was devastating.
I pour so much of myself into my hair as an extension of my mixedness. I write this column to express myself. For crying out loud, I wrote my college essay about learning to love my hair and embracing my identity in the ways I could.
I think losing such a cherished part of me was the hardest thing to grapple with.
Anyone who knows me knows I hate wasting things, and this felt like years of time, energy, money, and care wasted down the drain with the hair I was losing. Then I started doing the math (never let me do math).
If hair grows half an inch per month, it would take me almost two years to regrow my hair to just the shoulder length it’s already at. I could forget about my waist-length dreams until well after I graduated college.
And what was I supposed to do in the meantime? How many different colors of headbands could I buy to mask the thinning? How many times could I put my hair in a claw clip to disguise the density before I just made things worse? My brain was going a million miles a minute.
I kept searching for something I could change, but came up empty. So I eventually decided to stop guessing and get blood work done.
The results? Promising. There were things I could work on to try to address some of the issues. The downside? My hair growth has been exceedingly slow. The first few inches won’t even reflect the changes I’d made, and I’d still be actively shedding. Unfortunately, both turned out to be true.
I’m three months into my efforts to repair my hair, and I’m looking at many months, probably even years, to go. So I take my vitamins, eat as well as I can, and take care of my scalp.
But I still look back at pictures from high school and genuinely struggle to reconcile them with who I am today. If I had the chance, would I choose my college life or go back to that dark time? Because at least I had my hair.
I try to remember that growth isn’t linear, and that someday, all my efforts won’t be for naught.
Until then, I take it day by day.
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