NOVEMBER 2, 2009, TRANSITIONING

I have finally found my hair goal: to go natural. It happened by accident, purely and simply. In search of a hair color to cover my newly found gray hairs, I decided to look at color options for European type hair, because that's what I thought I had to do. I went to Loreal and Clairol web sites to find the answer. In my quest, I stumbled upon the process of “hennae-ing”. This 5+ thousand year old process of using the henna plant to color the hair, naturally, with virtually no harsh chemicals or side effects. Unlike the process of coloring hair with permanent or semi permanent dyes, I tried to absorb as much info as I could find, in effort to get the best results. But, my underlying problem remained: relaxing my hair. I had relaxed my hair from the age of 5 or when my mother got tired of getting a comb through my naturally very thick hair. I am now 37 years old and only have gone natural once, but only because my hair fell out because of the process of dyeing and relaxing my my hair, AT THE SAME TIME! Years later, I now have about ½ inch of new growth and shoulder length hair, which is fairly healthy. The last chemical thing I’ve done to my hair was a relaxer in September and before that, some bleach highlights (surprised that my hair didn’t fall out- I tried to avoid the “bald thing” by doing the process myself at home, waiting two weeks, and then doing the relaxer).

After doing some online research, I realized that the sites I was going to focused on European type hair and not much on African type hair that was fried and dyed and neutralized to some pseudo-European quality that is more work than need be or should be. On a side note, if you have to do so much to your hair to trick yourself and others that your hair is another texture, shouldn’t that have tipped us off that it was something wrong to do? But I guess hindsight is 20/20 vision and I could afford to be self righteous now that I have been forced to analyze myself due to the fact that I am trying to cover up newly found gray hairs (would I have made this analysis if I hadn’t been vainly trying to cover grays- I would like to say yes, but probably not:)

Happily, Jehovah felt sorry for his vain daughter, because I found a very encouraging website: www.curlynikki.com. I can definitely see myself doing this for the rest of my life and also my daughters'. I found transitioning advice for women with my hair texture. I have read several comments thus far dealing with the paring away of deeply sown in feelings about relaxing hair, your self awareness, and surprisingly how others view you, especially after you’ve gone natural. A lot of people (I’m thinking people of color, black people in particular) may encourage you to keep relaxing, while not forking up money to help with maintenance and upkeep of that hair lifestyle, stating: “Oh, why did you decide to change? Or “Are you going to be able to comb your hair?” I was getting tired of all those chemicals seeping into my cerebellum and gray matter and why the heck won’t I be able to comb my hair?! Later for all those ignorant naysayers. Down with lye and ammonia. Power to the hair. Let's begin this journey.