I cut my hair...

I had been toying with the idea of cutting my hair for months for purely cosmetic reasons. I kept postponing it out of the fear that the flat back, dropped-on- the-head-in-infancy shape of my head would not be too flattering. On this particular morning, I woke up feeling the urgency to cut it all off. It was post a crazy episode-filled night. My emotions were high but this time around I could not cry, no matter how much I tried. I couldn’t send rage-filled smses that would leave me embarrassed the day after, either. I thought about jumping off the four story high balcony of our flat but I knew I wouldn’t make a pretty corpse and “a girl must be pretty at all times”. I couldn’t bring myself to slit my wrists. I didn’t know how, and deep down inside, I feared I’d survive the whole thing and end up with really ugly wrists….people would stare…and wonder…..why did she do that to herself? Perhaps it was the feeling I had long been waiting for. I knew I didn’t want to die. I knew that the craziness was way too crazy to die for. I knew that the craziness had finally ended and I had to start putting it behind me…

It is then that I took a pair of sharp paper scissors and began dabbling with the idea of cutting off my long beautiful locks. I looked in the mirror and noticed a certain beauty about my hair I hadn’t noticed before. My locks were long, even-sized…they had a glimmer to them that seemed to scream: “Don’t you dare do it” Without thinking too much about it…I put scissor to hair and started snip-snipping away. After cutting off the first chunk of hair in the front, I realised what I had done and wished I hadn’t done it but knew that I did not have the courage to go out in public with five locks missing from the front of my head. So I continued and the experience suddenly became very liberating. I felt like I was peeling off a layer of skin that had gone dead and had been hanging on my body for way too long, making me look old and haggard. After a while, it became a more practical exercise. Does the right side look much higher than the left? Is it too short? And most importantly, do I look like I was dropped on my head when I was a baby?

I guess all of this didn’t matter. My hair was off my head. I was probably not going to be greeted with “Greetings, irie sister” when I walked through the Rosebank Rooftop Market. I would probably not get the usual “Ooh, your braids are so beautiful. How do I get my hair to do that?”, from ignorant white people. I wouldn’t be able to have my hair in a ponytail and let a few locks fall onto my forehead fringe-style which always worked for evening events. My head no longer had much hair on it. To top it off, there was a visible bald patch just above my left ear (everybody makes mistakes). This was hairless me and sooner or later I had to get used to it and bring my sexy back quick and a fast!

I’m not going to go on about it like it was a life-changing experience. But I do believe that our hair does carry our burdens or the energies that come with them. There is a great feeling of control that comes with cutting off one’s hair. There is also a feeling of lightness and the hope of new beginnings. I don’t regret it one bit. It served its purpose…

Next time you see me on the streets, though, I hope to have gotten the hot, sexy braids that sometimes come to me in my dreams! HOLLA!