My love hate relationship with my hair

I have realised that I have a love-hate relationship with my hair....There, I said it. I am a young black woman from South Africa and ever since I can remember I have, at one time or another, had a problem with my hair. I have the kind of hair that people refer to as being hard to manage, stubborn, kinky etc, and I have loads of it (if only it was long too), I remember being younger and trying to hold it in a pony tail and it was always a huge mission especially when it was "fra" (when it needed an urgent relaxer - we tend to say its frustrated - fra).

I also remember how frustrated I used to get when I would go to a hair salon and come out looking as though I had gone for a wash and blow out when I had actually gone for a relaxer....yes, I have probably shed as many tears for my teenage crushes as I have for my hair. At some point I even considered shaving off patches of hair in the center of my head so that I could have less hair. I used to look at people with thin hair and envy them because their relaxers would always come out perfectly and they seemed to last longer. I figured that if I shaved parts of my hair off, then my problems would all go away...thankfully I never EVER went through with that bright idea.

Okay, I guess the above is the HATE part of my relationship with my hair...Now comes the part that I am trying to work on...the LOVE between me, myself and my hair. Isn't it funny how sometimes the one thing we hate about ourselves tends to be the one thing we get the most compliments on? For some reason when people talk about my hair (on my good hair days) they tell me how nice and thick it is. I never understood how something that I hated so much could be the one thing that people love about my hair until I met up with one fabulous hairstylist. That man worked magic on my hair, he relaxed it perfectly and then cut the split ends in a way that no other stylist had done before. My hair was AMAZING!!! When I turned my head, my wonderful crown of glory seemed to flow fabulously in the same direction. It felt as though someone was always following me with a fan like they do on photo shoots. That's when I realised why most people love thick hair. Unfortunately that only lasted for about 3 weeks, then, it was back to hating my hair. However, for some reason those 3 weeks have stayed with me until now (6 years later), and they are the reason why I decided to start this blog.

Last year I discovered a few blogs on hair and I decided to grow my hair really long, just to see how long it could grow. I must admit, it became a bit of an obsession for the first 2 weeks, then I stopped trying, then I started again...you get the love-hate thing I spoke about earlier? My siblings thought I was crazy but my boyfriend was supportive (but I think secretly he thought I was crazy too). I must admit, it has been harder than I thought, my hair has grown a little bit, but because I have spent a few months with my hair in corn rows or a pony tail most of the time, my hairline is beginning to disappear. So I decided to start a blog (not because my hairline is beginning to disappear) but because I thought it would be fun to share my personal hair journey.

So here goes....