As a rule of thumb my natural hair journey is me travelling as far as humanly possible away from my natural hair.
I spent most of my childhood daydreaming about having long straight hair and most of my adulthood experimenting with every kind of hairdo. I’ve been permed, relaxed, weaved and braided but when the chemicals wear off and the extensions are removed I’m back to spending time with my nemesis. My natural hair. Every time I look in the mirror my unruly, unattractive, uneven afro waves back at me.
In the grand scheme of things the ongoing battle I have with my fro isn’t a big deal, but it definitely bothers me more than any of my other imperfections. Perhaps because it’s more visible to the world, but more likely it’s because I decided at a very young age that this ugly looking sponge was just not for me and I’ve spent so much time and money trying to fight nature and losing. Mother nature has been consistently kicking my backside for the last 44 years and will quite rightly continue to do so.
So why have I decided to start a blog about my hair? Am I on some sort of journey? Do I feel inspired by people like Jamelia who have abandoned their weaves in order to embrace their natural hair? Have I finally come to accept the inevitability of the situation? Nope. I build websites for a living and needed material for a development blog site I’m experimenting with. I work a lot better if I’m dealing with real work so I decided to combine that, with my never ending hair whinges and write occasional blog posts about my frizzy nemesis. I have an afro and I live in the suburbs and long after I’ve moved onto my next digital project I will continue to be “The Suburban Afro”