My hair! This coily, kinky and stubborn mess on my head has completely changed my life. It seems so surreal to me that just five months ago I was hanging onto thin, feeble, single stranded, constantly tangled, split-ended but shoulder length hair. Why? Well, because it was shoulder length of course. Apparently, the mere fact that I could hold my hair in a frail unhappy ponytail was satisfactory enough to blind me of the very fact that I had been harboring unhealthy hair on my head for so long. Not just that but also that I had been consistently and ever so faithfully mutilating my hair in a bid to mitigate an already bad situation. It is as if the proverb, “two wrongs do not make a right,” was foreign to me.
Being the proactive person I declare myself via mantra to be, I take responsibility for my hairtastrophy. But in my defense this was never entirely my fault. Every time I would remotely mention cutting my hair in public everyone would look at me like I had juju. “Have you lost your mind?”, they would mutter, “you will look like a man”. Now this last statement particularly scared me because I not so long ago transitioned from the tomboy phase of my life. The very thought of backtracking undoubtedly sent a shiver down my spine. These are the reasons I constantly gave myself. Of course they were true, but only up to a point. It was a reflection of who I was on the inside, too preoccupied about the external to recognize that the internal is where priority lies.
My hair, this bobo, looked decent enough for people to dish heartwarming compliments about it. Regardless, I knew I was a fraud. I knew how much hair I lost to the comb demon every day and more so on wash days. I knew what kind of spider web tangles and split ends I was hiding. But I also knew how to style that dying mane to look like Rapunzel just walked into the building. I had perfected the art. After all, this is who I truly was in every essence of my life. In my salvation, I was not consistently reading my bible, neither was I going out of my way to pray and seek God. Frankly I knew my salvation was stagnating- in my comfort, just still and mucky as a swamp only doing only as much as was required of me, church Sundays and all. I was hardly keeping it together professionally either; which is truly sad because as an intern I am only just beginning. Nonetheless, it didn’t matter to me enough to desire change. I mean, I was going to church every Sunday wasn’t I? I did everything my boss required me to do when I was required to it. I simply got by, and it killed me.
The truth is, we weren’t created to exist we were created to live and to be of impact to the world. It took my mother being admitted in the hospital to realize that I needed to take charge of my own life and hers too, amid temporarily. And with that I went to the barber shop and asked him to shave the hair. Contrary to my expectations, I didn’t feel a pinch of pain as I stared at the shoulder long strands on the floor. In fact, it ignited a new revolution inside of me. An intrinsic desire to nurture something from the ground up. This new found discipline began to reflect in all other avenues of my life. It wasn’t the numerous bloggers I followed or the wave of natural hair movement that is sweeping across our nation that caused me to take the plunge. It was the mere desire to be genuine and to be the same on the inside and out. Here I am a month later, with about an inch of hair and completely certain that this coily, kinky, tough and stubborn mess changed my life. I could not be happier.
Vision Sifuma (23)
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