TJ Michaels

I know many of you have seen this video before but I just love it. What brought this about? I was in Indianapolis for work at a customer site. As I walked through the cafeteria a woman I didn’t know caught me by the sleeve and asked, “Girl, are those sisterlocks?”

She was a beautiful woman…but her hair was thinning and breaking especially around the edges. She had a receding hairline where her hair should have been.

Been there, done that.

I spent a whole lot of years trying to get my hair to do something that it was never meant to do – be straight. I would go devotedly to the beauty shop, sit for hours (they double and triple booked in case somebody cancelled… but nobody ever did) for them to get to me so they could put a glop of grease on my scalp to try to protect it from burning when they put the lye relaxer in my hair.

Then I would sit with tears in my eyes for about fifteen or twenty minutes while they tried to get to the two thousand six hundred and forty nine women in the shop. I would get a rinse with some really good smelling shampoo followed by a setting solution that stung so bad the tears came back with a vengeance.

Next, my hair was rolled, slicked down or styled into whatever doo I was after, and I was off to sit under the dryer for an hour and a half so my hair could dry to a crackling, stiff-but-bone-straight consistency. After all that my hair was surprisingly soft, smelled great and was straight as I-don’t-know-what. And I did that every six to eight weeks for years.

Why? Because when I was growing up, curly, kinky or nappy hair was SO not in. Women of color were taught to straighten their hair. No doubt my hair was easier to manage when it was straight, but there was one little problem: My self-esteem became wrapped up in my hair. So what do you think happened to my self-esteem when my super-long gorgeous hair, after so many years of being practically burned out by perm solution, began breaking and thinning to the point where I had to wear hair pieces on my ponytails to even HAVE a ponytail? Hummph!

It seems to be a normal thing in society these days to be convinced that what you were born with is nowhere near good enough to be acceptable. If you have thin lips they tell you to go get ‘em plumped. If you’re a big girl, you’re told to get skinny. If you’re skinny, you’re told to get some hips. If you’re dark, you’re told you should be lighter. If you have straight hair, you’re told you need some curls. If you have curls, you’re told it should be straight. I mean, DAYUM!

I’d been toying with the idea of going natural for a long time but had no idea how to go about it. Then I met a fabulous author named Kimberly Kaye Terry. She’s a natural hair-wearing sistah who pointed me to some really good resources to research the path I wanted to go. It was encouraging hearing her story on what made her go natural. And it was something I wanted so much.

Me chillin’ in my office

So finally I found an answer to the kind of doo I wanted to wear. I have been sporting locs (no, not dreadlocs ’cause there ain’t nothing dreadful about my hair) for two years now and I couldn’t be happier. My hair is thick, long, strong and beautiful.

Check out this music video about how we women, all of us women, are more than what appears on the outside. I absolutely LOVE IT! If you can’t see the embedded video, visit this link.