See the truth is this... When I started with my dreadlocks... I didnt feel very beautiful... When I looked in the mirror, I didnt really see beauty... And when people saw my dreads for the first time, they would say oh, you have dreads now or you look.... interesting or what happened to your relaxed hair... But no one ever said you look beautiful or you are pretty like this, in your natural state.. Not my friends, not my family.. No one... Atleast at first... One time, a friend in res said you cant have that hair for long if you want to be in the corporate world, it doesnt look nice, its untidy... And it was difficult... As a teenager, I was so used to having people tell me I was beautiful, that I had a pretty face and that my skin was flawless.. And it felt good... Every 16 year old girl wants to hear those things... But when I took out my brades, cut off my relaxed hair... and went to the hood to try regain some sense of my African identity back... I cant remember a day where I felt more ugly than I did that day... My hair was short, it was course, it was in its natural, and according to many people around me, including myself, it was not beautiful.. I remember the first (and only) time I had a weave... Literally every third person I walked passed either looked at me with amazement (good amazement) or came out and said you are so beautiful, you should have that hair more often... And I felt beautiful.. When I looked in the mirror, I saw beauty... My face looked better, my skin was lighter and glowing and my hair was long and straight and silky... I was beautiful, because my hair was closer to a white girls hair than it was to mine... The last 16 months have been hard... for my self-esteem... Ive had to look myself in the mirror and tell myself you are beautiful over and over again, until I finally believed it.. Very few people have been able to look at me with my dreadlocks and appreciate their beauty... Infact many black people look at my dreads and get disgusted, sometimes they even tell me... Lol, my 12 year old sister even said to me once please dont come to my school with your hair looking like that and I was going to watch her play sport... I am learning.... to appreciate my beauty... my own beauty... my natural beauty... the beauty that is indigenous to my forefathers and mothers... my beauty that I have truly inherited from my great-great-great grandmothers... I am learning the ability to run my hands through my course hair and feel its texture and say God, this is beautiful... I did it for the movement.. I did it to prove a point, to myself...
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 21:48:01 +0000
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