I May Be Changing My Hair Goal

When I first found out that Black women could, and regularly do, grow exceptionally long hair, I was floored.  No one in my family has really long hair and all the Black female celebrities with long hair use weave or extensions of some kind (In fact, most female celebrities period wear some kind of hair extensions, but that's an altogether different topic.) so you can hardly blame me for buying into the hype.  Add in the fact that my mother never really took the greatest care of our (me and my sisters') hair, I was almost doomed from the start to accept the "fact" that my hair couldn't grow long, doomed to accept that only the select few Black women blessed with "good" or "pretty" hair could grow it long without a problem.

But thank the Creator I've been enlightened and no longer buy into any of that BS.  Now I know that Black women are no different from women of other races.  Some of us have slow growing hair, some have hair that grows very quickly.  Some have an anagen (growth) phase of a few years, and some of us have growth phases that can last up to ten years or even longer.  The one uniting factor between Black women and women of all other ethnicities concerning long hair is that effort must be put in for the results we want to achieve to become a reality.  Whether someone's hair is stick straight or full on nappy, you have to work with what you have in order to grow it long.  The problem is, most Black women don't want to put in the work, or simply don't know what that work should consist of.

How many people do you know that can honestly say they know the difference between the sound of a brush or comb passing safely through their hair, and the sound of individual strands breaking?  How many people know the difference between mechanical (and therefore preventable) hair damage, heat damage, and breakage due to dryness?  My guess is, unless you come from a family that has a strong ethic for hair care, you don't know that many.  I want to change that.  And not just with a few people here and there.  I want to change it on a large scale.  I want it to become the norm for Black women to be seen with long, big, natural hair.

And I think the best way to go about doing that is to lead by example.  You may or may not know that my end goal with my natural hair journey is to grow my hair long enough to touch my waist when stretched.  But recently, I thought, "Why not go longer?"  The fact of the matter is, the distance from the top of my head to my waist is not that long, due to my height.  I'm under five feet tall, so my torso is drastically shorter than those of most other women, so my hair doesn't have to grow as long to reach my natural waist.  Well, 18 inches isn't exactly anything to sneer at, but you catch my drift.

I'm thinking I may change my hair goal to hip length hair, just for the hell of it.  I'm super short, so I think I should be able to manage that.  Unless my growth cycle is set to some abysmally short number of years, I think I can handle having hip length hair, because that means it would probably hang somewhere around my waist when dry, which would be suuuuper hot!!!  What do you think?