The Knotty Kinky Truth

Here is my confession—the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

I love my curly hair.

There was once a time when I envied you, you with your straight hair. Your silken strands that shimmered in the light, the flawless sheen parading before my own eyes, mocking me. Your hair laid flat on your head and pirouetted at the whisper of a breeze. So light and graceful while my own dull dreads weighed heavily against my shoulders. At the tiniest drop of moisture my hair would set off the alarms and put up its defense mechanism—a layer of armor ten times its original size.

And, so, I hid it in a bun. As if the bun would shrink it to a manageable, inoffensive size. For 10 years my hair was locked in a hair tie. And I envied every girl whose hair was as straight as her thin-lipped smile.

But college does wonders to a girl. College really shapes and molds you (or rather makes you realize there is no specific shape or mold).

There are thousands of more people who you see just walking around campus. People who don’t all seem to be wearing the same ripped Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle jeans, generic polos with popped collars, and black North Face jackets (though there are still a lot of those). People who are not all blonde haired and blue eyed, or brown haired and blue eyed, or tall and skinny with long legs. People look short and curvy, tall and boxy, clean and shaven, dirty and shaggy, yellow, brown … people didn’t seem to need to trim their edges just to fit a specific mold.

And that’s when I started to grow into myself. I didn’t really like myself all that much. I tried to change a lot about me. But college opened my eyes to the beauty of diversity. So what, my hair was thick and curly? So what, my legs are kind of muscular for a girl? How could I expect people to like me for who I am if I wasn’t comfortable showing the real me?

So, here we are at 23. It took me a lot longer than a lot of other people. But I’m embracing my curls. They get tangled and gnarled, but it’s easier to just let them be than to fight against them in an attempt to make them straight. I like having hair with some personality—even if it isn’t that shiny or soft. It’s mine, it’s real and it’s still growing on my head. So, I think I’m going to take ownership of it now instead of pretending it’s some orphan child I’ve never seen before. Why would I want to look like every other Asian girl with straight black hair, when I could look like a smaller portion of Asian girls with that weird, in between, curly-wavy hair?

To my fellow knotty, kinky girls: cheers! Let ‘em loose. Go wild. Have some fun. We’re not meant to be tamed.

L.

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