Personal Narrative: How I Avoid My Hair

Words: 674
Pages: 3

My curls stayed hidden as much as possible until my sophomore year. But my skin, that was always on show. Nothing could hide that. I detested dark skinned dolls. I never had one. I always wanted to be Barbie and Cinderella. Other white actresses made me want to be them. I never saw a Latina actress with hair as wild as mine and brown actresses were rare. The troubling part of this fact was that I never questioned seeing mostly white girls across my screen until recently. The only prominent non-white characters in my childhood were off of Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer. How is this okay?
I ruined my hair as I grew older. Chemical treatments relaxing and damaging beautiful curls. A mane tamed to hide itself from the world. Then as I got older it was fried and flattened. I think part of my issues stemmed from the lack of curly headed girls at my elementary school and on TV. For seven years no other girl in school had curly hair and skin like me. No one had large untamable hair
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I had to be patient every time I braided my hair so it could properly heal from the damage I had inflicted on it. In a way I was letting myself heal from the absence of role models and the years I spent rejecting myself. Then my junior year I cut most of it off. I had not cut my hair that much since the third grade. I now had a curly bob that felt as free as I did. I now hate the thought of straightening it. I now have a poof that represents me without trying to. This summer I made the decision to dye my hair pink. Not because I hated the brownish black color I had, but because I liked pink and thought it would be fun. And that's how young brown girls should feel. They should love every part of themselves and only change things about themselves because they feel it would be fun. My hair is a huge part of who I am and I don’t know who I would be if I didn’t learn to accept it and its