SPEAK
.
By college, I had a bitchy attitude and hair under control.
word
FRIENDS WITH THE 'FRO
E a H " b s b a t t l a t d a n e t
A hairowing journey to self acceptance
by Natalie Johnson
The worst day of my seventh-grade year was the one when a classmate decided to make a list of traits and have two popular boys fill out which girls in our class they thought represented the best and worst of them. The list contained everything important to image-conscious 12-year-olds: body, face, legs, smile, hair. A gangly, awkward, head-taller-than-all-the-boys me made the list in that last trait: I had the worst hair in the seventh grade. It was official.
We all have those vivid preteen moments that leave an indelible pain. I'll never forget looking at that piece of notebook paper, crumpled from being passed around all day, and feeling the heat of humillation and self-consciousness burn up from my gut, redden my complexion (also deemed worst), sting my eyes and smolder to the tips of my frizzy, wiry, kinky, wretched hair.
The worst thing about it was that it was true. My hair, by any standards
except Richard Simmons's, was horrible. It was a shoulder-length brown mess of frizz, a miserable creature that was starkly different from the straight, smooth, highlighted coifs of the other seventh-grade girls.
I didn't know how to fix it. My mother, also a victim of Explosive Hair, had horn hers years before. We had just two hair tools at our house. One was a bright yellow hair dryer that short-circuited after 10 minutes, dated circa late 1970s. The other was a one-inch-barrel curling iron missing a plastic piece. Using
To watch it dry was to watch an explosion in slow-motion: first, the outer strands would twist and stack on top of each other, and then the short hairs on top of my head would stick straight up. My hair would transform, layer by layer, from a slick, straight entity to a sprawling mass of fluff, sprinkled with strands that looked obscenely like pubes.
When I straightened my hair, it would wrap its tentacles around my neck.
The climax of infamy was one Saturday morning after a sleepover I awoke to find a dead baby frog on my pillow. The girls all shrieked and called for a man to dispose of it. As the frog was carted away, my friend Casey noticed a long brown strand of hair between its toes. "Look!" she cried, pointing, "The little frog got caught in Natalie's hair! Natalie's hair killed it!"
it guaranteed a burned thumb. My mom bought me hair products, but they never worked. She once got a $10 bottle the size of a hotel shampoo sample. Ten drops of the serum were to transform my hair into starched, ironed curtains that would sway when I walked (at least, that's what the magazine ad looked like). Half a bottle later, my hair was transformed into sticky fuzz.
For eighth grade graduation, I chopped it to chin-length, a decision I regretted for two years, during which my face looked fatter. My hair with fewer inches to weight it down, swelled.
Some nights, as I lay going to sleep, I'd feel it drying and start to cry as it got rough. I'd grab a clump and pull it out, desperate. wore it in a ponytail for three years straight.
Over the years, though, I learned to deal with my hair. I employed the
greatest coping strategy: I made a joke out of it. My hair was my fame, my trademark, the butt of everyone's jokes. My best friends never passed up an opportunity to make fun of it:
Lyrically: "You know in that Dashboard song where he says 'your hair is everywhere?' Well, he's talking about you."
In college, I was set free from the shackles of hair trauma. That my hair was starkly different was no longer considered bad. My roommate tutored me in the ways of hair, explaining basics ("Yeah, it'll sizzle like that if you try to curl it wet") and sharing a battalion of products.
On brushing:"It sounds like when my grandpa used to brush the sheepdogs fur."
On the kid who just tripped:
"Aauuqh! Natalie's hair got him!"
I'm now at peace with my hair. I'm proud of my wild curls. There are still days when I gaze at "normal" hair with envy — my roommate Amy has gorgeous, long, strong blonde locks that fall smoothly down her back — but, for the most part, I'm happy with what I've got. It was a long journey my hair and I took to accepting ourselves, but we made it with minimal damage. Except, of course, for the frog.
Eighth-grade graduation.
Five inches cut that morning resulted in as many added in volume.
02. 02.2006 JAYPLAY <19