Weave Got Problems: My current hair journey

My hair has been one of the hardest things to conquer in my life. To this day, it still gives me problems. I think my hair is 4C, but I am not 100% sure. I recently entered the natural hair gang in the 9th grade, but I was more aware about entering it in the 10th grade. What I mean is that I had my last relaxer or texturizer ( both still contain chemicals that straighten your hair) near the end of my 8th-grade year, and had never relaxed it since then. I started to be more aware in the 10th grade because there was new growth that I hadn’t felt and seen since preschool, and I wanted to see what my hair actually looked like.

I did it all: natural ( in the beginning), relaxers & texturizers with braids, and weaves; I will soon be natural once again. But I keep my hair in protective hairstyles in order to prevent breakage and to promote growth. I also do this to prevent people from touching my hairXD. It is an extremely grueling process to manage this hair, but I would not give it up for the world. It is extremely fun to squeeze but to also to style. I can straighten it, or I can leave it in its natural state. It’s my hair and it’s my life.

But the question you are all asking is how did I get here? My hair was easy to manage when I was a kid. My mom had to schedule a day for me and my sister to get our hair brushed by her, and it made my head hurt here and there. And at the end of the day, my sister and I had puffs or twists to wear at school for the entire day. But growing up in the culture of America, my community showed that straight hair was beautiful hair and that anyone who didn’t align to these standards weren’t necessarily called ugly, but they were not complemented. So my sister and I went home one day with the objective to have silky straight hair. We asked our mom if she could help us get and keep straight hair, and she obliged knowing that it would take a lot less time to do our hair. And we got our straight hair. It was unnatural, but it was straight. And we had maintained this regimen for more than 5 years.

I go online one day after my relaxer to find what was in the chemicals that make my hair so straight and question why my hair was not growing as much. And what I found shocked me. I saw a youtube video of someone placing natural hair in the relaxer solution for a while only to have it dissolve! Is what I want for my hair? To fall victim to chemicals that knock its pH out of whack only to have a silky press for society? And I stopped anticipating and asking for relaxers. My older sister followed me secretly ( although she will probably claim she was going to stop anyways), and I told my mother to never relax my younger sister’s hair. To this day, I have been able to grow my natural hair at a slow but steady rate. I hypothesize that I will reach the length I find ideal in about 6 more years, but I will persist and wait through this entire journey. Hence the reason why it is called a “Hair Journey”…

But this is taking a lot of resilience too. I am not saying that I like brushing or braiding my hair for protective styles ( I really dislike braiding), but I am saying that I have been able to gain quite a bit of patience with my hair, and I look forward to working with it in college. It will be have been roughly 20 years at that time when I will re-meet a friend of mine I had long waited for since pre-school: my natural hair.

— Gabriela Nguena Jones