I am Not My Hair...or am I?

For those who have not heard (which I would think are very few of you), I shaved my head in January 2012.  I had always wanted to do it; ever since I heard India Aire’s I am not my hair on the radio, I felt inspired to truly get rid of the damn thing.  That’s right, I have not been on good terms with my hair.  In fact, it took me a long time to accept that I wasn’t going to have the stick straight hair that I saw on TV and that the hairstyles I wanted were just not going to work out.  And once I accepted my curly hair fate I still struggled to just figure my hair out.  Some of you may understand this story, and some of you may not.  But when I heard India Arie belting out how she struggled with her own hair I felt a connection and all I wanted to do was to get rid of it.

But as we all know wanting to do something is quite a bit different from actually doing something and it didn’t really happen.  To be honest, I didn’t want people to get the wrong idea for the reasons I was hairless.  But when I came to Africa where shaving your head was acceptable and common I knew I had to do it or I’d have missed my chance.

And so I did.  A fellow PCV who had shaved her head a while back cut my long locks and I went to a little tin hut of a barber shop to get it all evened out.

And It. Was. Amazing.

I felt so free.

That didn’t mean there weren’t times where I desperately missed my hair.  Not having hair, I learned, made me feel naked and exposed.  I couldn’t hide behind my previously long, thick, locks anymore.  And a part of me felt insecure and less feminine since I couldn’t spend 30 minutes dressing my hair up.  And while many of my friends told me how I “rocked the look” I had to get over my insecurities and flaunt my head proudly.

Now, my hair is longer than when I left for Africa.  A part of me wants to shave it off again; a shaved head is so much easier to manage.  But I love having hair, I love spending time on it, and I love styling it however I want.  So, at the end of this journey I’m not sure if I can proudly scream out that “I am not my hair” but it was still fun.

So let's start at the begining:

This was my hair when I first got to Lesotho.

January 2012: This was my hair after I first shaved it.  I didn't want to shave it completely off since I'm pretty sure the top of my head is bright white and, with the Lesotho sun, is a perfect recipe for a bad sun burn.   This is the last time my hair touched a pair of scissors or any cutting instrument.

March 2012: My hair was definitely growing and it was in the "can't do anything even if you wanted to" stage.  A friend saw this picture and said I looked like Halle Berry; and so I call this the "Halle Berry" stage.

 June 2012: This was probably the most awkward stage of my hair: mullet hair.  It was long enough to keep my head warm in winter but not long enough to style.  The nice thing was that I was beginning to get my curls back!

July 2012: By July my hair was long enough to be styled Basotho style.  Basotho call this styling technique "braiding with yarn" but it's not actually braiding.  My host sister spent hours wrapping portions of my hair in black yarn and then connecting them to make a design.  This hair style lasted about 4 days.

October 2012: By this point my hair was curly and long enough to put some product in.  To be honest I miss my hair at this length.  Easy to manage yet looked pretty good.

November 2012: Getting a little longer and curlier (this was my visa photo for my South African visa).

 December 2012: In Capetown and my hair was long enough to blow in the wind!  It was also long enough to do french braid pig-tails.

March 2013: At this length my hair could once again become ridiculously messy (though still relatively easy to de-tangle).  I could also put into a ponytail.

April 2013: At this length my hair styled in to very pretty cascading curls.  This photo was taken at a school event in town.

July 2013: By July my curls loosened up a bit to give me more length.  The nice thing about shaving a curly head is that curly hair looks great in layers and that's exactly how my hair is now, tons of tiny layers.

October 2013: My hair is now longer than when I shaved it.  I can style it tons of different ways though with the limited water (which means I wash my hair once a week) I usually put it up in a ponytail or two french braids (which is nice when it's windy).

Novemebr 2013: My latest hair-do.  I wanted to look as Mosotho as possible my last few weeks at site but unfortunately this only lasted a week (my hair is just too silky).  This hair took about 2 hours to do and it was VERY painful.  I have a lot of admiration for Basotho women who do this every month (it's also not a lot of fun to sleep on though I guess you get used to it.)  When in Africa, do as an African women do.