December 31, 2023
episode description
Sometimes I feel like I let my hair define who I am as a Black woman or even just as a person too much. To the point where it impacts my mental health. Hair depression sucks and I wish it didn't control my perception of beauty as much as it does.
Hair Depression Defined by Mane Curator
transcript
In this episode I wanted to talk about hair depression. It's something that sometimes you feel ashamed of, it's embarrassing, and especially when you're surrounded by all this rhetoric about love yourself this and self esteem that and then to know that just the other day you were crying on the floor because your hair wasn't done.
It just embarrassing. So I found this website— this article, and I'm gonna read a little excerpt from it. It says, "You planned your outfit and the final piece, your crown isn't playing its part." Side note, I hate calling my hair my crown, it feels so cheesy. Anyway, continuing.
"Maybe your edges won't lay how you envisioned or your afro puff is just not round or big enough. It's showtime and your hair is just not hairing. Hair depression is a phenomenon unique to black women and is a term used to describe the emotional and psychological distress that arises when their hair is not styled or doesn't meet societal standards. Black women often internalize societal messages that equate their value and worth to their appearance.The resulting hair depression can manifest as anxiety, frustration, or even full blown emotional breakdowns."
I recently went six, seven weeks without having my hair in braids, and I was okay the first two weeks. By week three, I was ready to have a breakdown. I was ready to cry. I felt so ugly. It's just like needing your hair to be done all the time is just a crutch.
When I don't have my braids, I just feel like I'm not myself. I feel like I'm not Sidney. I've been thinking a lot about always needing to have— or feeling like I always need to have my hair done. And I've been purposefully trying not to do my hair all the time. To have my hair in braids all the time.
And I'm learning to love how I look with my natural hair. But it is so difficult.
Like I sometimes when my hair is natural hair, I look in the mirror and I just hate how I look. I hate myself and I just feel like I could cry, like, for real, because, you know, I say all these things, like I'll be like, Well, this is just how my hair grows out of my head, and you're just gonna have to accept it for how it is, because this is how I was born to look, right?
I'll say all these things— I'll be like, yeah, you're just gonna have to accept my afro puff for what it is, like, this is my natural hair. Yes! Black power!
I say those things. But, in reality, living through it is so difficult. Like, I'm trying so hard to feel beautiful. I'm trying so hard to feel beautiful without my fake hair, without my braids.
I want to feel and I want to believe that I am beautiful as just myself without it, but I don't. The truth is that I don't.
The truth is that I feel so ugly without my braids. I feel so like I'm not even wearing my skin correctly without my braids and Black women go through so much pressure to feel like they need to be put together at all times— to present a certain version of themselves.
Too happy, too sad, too angry, too aggressive, too much, too anything, right?
But it's so difficult. I remember this one time, in 7th grade, it was time for school pictures, and back in middle school, I was so obsessed with my hair being straight, and (more specifically) I was so obsessed with my real hair being straight. I didn't want to wear fake hair because if you wore fake hair, you were trashy and ghetto and I was not trashy and ghetto, therefore I refused to wear fake hair— and that included braids.
And so I went to my school picture, I straightened my hair and I took the school picture and I smiled and I was like, Oh my god, I look so cute. And when I got the picture back, my hair was so damaged. It was so jagged.
It was pathetic.
It had split ends everywhere. Like imagine an upside down triangle. That was my hair and I had bangs and I was wearing a headband. And if you compare it to my picture the year before, the sixth grade school picture, where my hair was thick and long down to like my boobs and then to then transition to that seventh grade picture, like I honestly haven't even looked at it to this day because it just feels like so gut wrenching.
I think about my hair back then and I feel so disgusted by how damaged and fried it was, like, ugh. But I held on to that, that little bit of hair that I had with everything in me.
And really, like, when I think back to, like, why I am like this— outside of the societal pressures of feeling like your hair always needs to be done as a Black woman, there exists no such thing as a messy bun for black women with 4C hair, 4B hair, 4A hair. There's no such thing.
I think back to when I was younger and I loved my braids, I loved my little beads and my barrettes in my hair, but I was always so hyper aware of the fact that I couldn't exist as a little girl in the same way that people with straight hair did. I wanted my hair to swing around I wanted to put it behind my ears.
I wanted to feel it on my neck. I wanted to jump in the swimming pool not even having a second thought about my hair just like everyone else.
But I couldn't.
I had to worry about my hair reverting into a curly mess. I had to worry about what was gonna happen to my hair after the pool time was over. Even when my hair was in braids I still had to worry about what's gonna happen to my hair after the pool time was over because washing your hair in braids does not just consist of oh, let me go wash it in the braids, like no, to really really get all the chlorine out of your hair you have to take those braids out, wash it, comb it, go through all those eeeeee feelings, like you know the expression that you have when your mom is combing your hair where you're like ouch. Your whole body just cringes in on itself.
You have to go through that and then you have to get your hair rebraided like it's a whole ordeal, it's a whole event and it just brings me back to what I was talking about in the last episode, pretty privilege, where hair depression, it just feels like it stems from that idea of the world will always prefer someone blonde and white and not me.
And not just the world, like obviously the world, but also you think of the people you want to find you attractive. It just feels like they will always choose someone blonde and white and not you before they choose you. It's like sometimes you're like well, it's stupid to equate your attractiveness to your hair.
But it's so not like— it's so real. Like other girls, you just want to be valued or feel valued in the same way that other girls do.
Anyway I'm sitting here talking in this episode with a half a head full of braids. And when I started braiding my hair I was grinning so hard. Like, my cheeks were sore from how hard I was grinning when I put that first braid in. And I just kind of feel embarrassed at the amount of relief I'm feeling right now that my hair is getting done. But at the end of the day, I think what I've realized is that what I want is not just to feel like I look good in my natural hair.
What I want is to be Black and beautiful and I want to believe that, like not just tell myself that and hope that one day it will stick. Like one day I'll believe it if I keep saying it enough. I want to be black and beautiful and know it in my core and be unshakeable in it when people say that my hair looks like cauliflower and that my forehead is big and they ask when are you gonna do your hair? Like, I want to be black and beautiful and not have those comments shake my conviction in the way that it always does, in the way that it has year after year.
I work every year to try to love myself for what I am, but I'm not there yet. And I mean, I feel like I'm getting there. I've made a lot of progress from that seventh grade girl who refused to wear fake hair and killed her hair, essentially, by wanting to look like other girls or wanting to have her hair and be pretty like other girls. To have hair that flows in the wind like other girls' did, which was stupid because my hair was permed and it definitely did not sway or flow or blow around in the wind anywhere.
Like once you styled your permed hair, it was stiff, it was staying there. You bend your neck and your hair is bending with you. Like a little shelf.
Anyway, I think I'm finding value in recognizing that you're working on it and that you're making progress, and not to take that progress for granted, because one day you'll look back and say, wow, I've come so far.
Like, maybe, maybe ten years from now I'll look back on myself and be like, wow, I've come so far from myself as a 22 year old. Just like I have for the 7th grade version of myself. But, in the meantime, the journey sucks, if I'm being honest. And hair depression is the worst. And I'm sure this will not be the last time I go through this.
I just can only take it one day at a time.