I am at a networking event. I am wearing my pink cat-eye glasses, multicolored kite-shaped drop earrings, my favorite lipstick—wine-colored Rebel by MAC, a gray sweater, blue jeans, and my favorite purple boots. I am standing and speaking to a white woman with long blonde hair. This is our first time meeting. As we talk and sip our drinks—wine for her and a Coke on the rocks for me—a white guy walks up to us, and she introduces him to me. She then turns to me and asks, “Are your pronouns she/her or they?” Her question, meant to convey her hipness and inclusiveness, and that she’d paid attention in those DEI trainings companies make their employees attend, offends me.
Her question, laden with assumptions, echoes my insecurities. It has been two years since I completed treatment for breast cancer. In that time, my hair has changed so much, been so unruly, that I cut it all off. I have also been in conflict and deep dislike with the fluffy body my cancer medication and medically induced menopause have left me with. A round face and body I no longer recognize when I look in the mirror. But I’ve finally found a barber and haircut I love. I’m settling into my new hair and starting to feel feminine again. And then this woman’s question topples my confidence like a tower of Jenga blocks. What is it about me that makes her ask this question? Do I not look like a “she”? Do I not look feminine? Would she have asked me this question if I were thinner? Younger? Lighter skinned? Would she have asked me this question if my hair was straight or loosely curled instead of tightly coiled cotton?
“She,” I answer. She.
◆
I called the funeral home where Granny lay to make a final request.
“Can you cut a piece of her hair off for me?”
I wanted a physical piece of Granny to hold onto. If parents can save their children’s baby teeth and locs of hair, then surely, I could save some part of Granny.
Later that evening, the funeral director gave me a thick loc of her hair in a small plastic bag. The salt and pepper strands were pressed straight and folded in half. The Black funeral home staff had pressed Granny’s hair just as she had lovingly pressed my hair when I was a little girl. I’d sit between her legs on our red shaggy carpet as she slathered Royal Crown grease onto my scalp and hair. We had a straightening comb that came with its own warmer. Granny would run the heated comb through my hair as it sizzled and steamed to the ends. When it was time for her to straighten the hair behind my ears, I’d hold them so she wouldn’t burn me. Afterwards, Granny would part my hair into sections, wrap pink sponge rollers with toilet tissue or wrapping paper, and roll my hair. Sometimes she’d arrange my hair in varying configurations of small ponytails held together by ribbons or ponytail holders with colored plastic balls at both ends—twisting or braiding my hair and adorning the ends with colorful barrettes shaped like animals or that have the days of the week written on them. Once Granny had properly combed, greased, and styled me, she ensured that I’d wake up looking fabulous by covering my hair with a stocking cap made from the cut-off seat of an old pair of white tights.
At eight or nine years old, I graduated from straightening combs to relaxers—back when hair stylists were called beauticians and hair salons were called beauty parlors. Aunt Cena’s salon in Florida; the salons on New Lots, Belmont and near Pitkin in Brooklyn; Miss Cora’s house in Queens. It didn’t matter where I got my perm. The beautification process was the same. I’d sit in the beautician’s chair as she greased my scalp and hairline to help prevent the perm from burning, and then she’d apply the relaxer to my roots. But it always burned. Scabs always formed on my scalp, no matter how much I tried not to scratch before my appointment. The lye unfurled my kinks and left me looking like those little girls on the boxes of home relaxers. Granny made sure my hair was bone straight and beautiful.
I imagined Granny’s pressed hair brushed into a ponytail and covered by the wig I’d bought for her to wear at her homegoing. Granny would never wake up again on this side of life, but she too would look fabulous in the morning.
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Radiation is the easiest part. That’s what I was told. That’s what I still believe. But there are things people, medical professionals, neglect to tell you. And you will scour Facebook groups and ask other breast cancer survivors about the new weird things happening to your body to make sure you’re not imagining things. No one mentioned that radiation might make me nauseous. No one said the techs would apply radiation to the area near my collarbone because there are lymph nodes there. No one told me the radiation would burn straight through, leaving my skin fried black over my collarbone and on my back. They didn’t tell me my hair would look and feel different at the end of radiation. They told me Anastrozole, meant to reduce the chance of my cancer coming back, might cause my hair to thin. Might. I thought I might escape that side effect. No one told me how quickly that thinning would happen, how emotional that thinning would be, how that thinning would upend how I felt about myself. No one told me.
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I stood in front of the hallway mirror and did my hair. I removed the jumbo bobby pins lining its perimeter. I then used a wide-toothed comb to unwind my straight hair, which I’d wrapped around my head in a doobie the night before. Once I’d let it down, I combed and arranged it into a bob with a part on the right side—the left side of my hair shorter than the right. Granny watched me from behind with a smile, her lips ajar. Hers was a smile of childlike wonder.
“Do you like it?” I asked.
“Yeah. I want you to do my hair like that.”
Granny’s real hair wasn’t long enough or full enough to style like mine. But her wigs were.
When she was just four years old, while playing in the kitchen, a pan of hot fish grease fell on Granny. The grease burned the side of her face and a large area in the middle of her head. Although her facial scars lightened over time until they were barely visible, shiny peach-colored skin was all that remained where hair once grew. Because kids can be cruel, they used to call Granny “burn up in sin.”
When Granny was old enough, she became an expert at styling her hair to hide her burn. She wore all kinds of hairstyles—her hair brushed up into a ponytail that was covered with a curly bun hairpiece, the front half of her hair slicked down and a curly half wig to cover the rest, weaves, and full wigs. Granny had had every type of wig—Jheri curl wigs, wigs with loose curls, wigs whose ends flipped outward, straight wigs, synthetic wigs, human-hair wigs, lace front wigs, raggedy we-ain’t-expecting-company wigs, running-errands wigs, church wigs. The goal was for the wigs to look believable, so they were never longer than a few inches down her back. In her seventy-four years, there was only one type of wig she did not wear: gray wigs. Granny refused to look old. All her wigs and hairpieces were some shade of black or brown.
Depending on her hairstyle or the type of hairpiece she wore, she might even perm her own hair. She’d sat at our dining room table many a night, plastic gloves, instructions, and relaxer kit spread out before her. She always lathered the white, stomach-churning cream along the entire length of her hair, even though the instructions said you should only apply it to the new growth. Granny would let nothing get between her and the perfect hairdo.
Granny passed away a few months after our last hallway hair session. While shopping for her funeral outfit, my friends Safiya and Samantha and I agreed that we’d each buy a wig to honor her. None of us had ever worn a wig before. Samantha ultimately chickened out. However, Safiya bought a straight, black wig that fell to her waist. The wig, combined with her thin frame and high cheekbones, made her look like a model. Ever a creature of habit, I got the same wig I’d bought for Granny to wear—a straight, layered number with a few big curls that moved when I swung my head. Although the wig had more body than my own hair, it didn’t look much different than how I usually wore my hair after just getting it roller set at the salon. It was so similar that my neighbors didn’t even know it was a wig when they took pictures of the three of us in front of their house. This wasn’t the first time I’d borrowed Granny’s style. My college friends often commented that my ‘60s flip hairstyle was the same as Granny’s wig. This body doubling made sense for us. Not only did we share hairstyles, but I often bought us matching clothes because I knew Granny would want whatever I’d gotten for myself—matching purple zip-up sweaters, black waterproof boots, bubble winter coats—hers always one size bigger than mine.
When Granny died, she got her wish. We were twins again.
I did her hair like mine—or rather, I did my hair like hers.
◆
My friend Safiya helped me prep for radiation by coming up with a plan for what I’d do with my hair during the five and a half weeks of treatment. We’d been commiserating about our hair woes and trading advice since meeting in law school eighteen years earlier. The fact that my left upper torso and underarm would eventually become too irritated for me to lift my arm for long periods of time meant that I’d have to replace my nightly hair-twisting routine with an easier regimen or style. She lived in California, so she bought and mailed me a hairbrush dryer that would give me a blow-out look. Her rationale was that my hair would be easier to manage if it were straight. It started out as a good plan.
For the first couple weeks of treatment, I sashayed into the Union Square building where I received radiation looking like a Fashion Fair or Dark & Lovely model from the ‘80s, my stretched twist out all fluffy and bouncing. By the end of the second week, the point at which my radiation oncologist said I’d “start to feel it,” both I and my hair were exhausted. Not to mention that if my chest and underarm hurt too much for me to lift my arm to twist my hair, then manipulating my hairbrush dryer would be just too hard. We hadn’t thought this thing all the way through. I no longer had the energy for cute hairstyles. I went from hair model to my friend Janine saying I looked homeless. My Clair Huxtable hair had morphed into a pinned-up afro decorated with random strands of my dog’s hair—a style I only took down once or twice a week. I looked like what I’d been through.
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On February 18, 2012, eight months after Granny’s death, I took an old pair of rusty, black-handled scissors she had probably bought before I was born, and I began cutting off the straight strands of my wet hair. I’d spent the day watching singer Whitney Houston’s nearly four-hour homegoing service on TV. Just as Granny had done with her friends at other homegoings, I took note of the VIP attendees—Alicia Keys, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, and Kevin Costner to name a few. I snacked as celebrities sang and reflected on Whitney’s life and legacy.
Whitney was part of the soundtrack of my childhood. When I was a kid, my ultra-religious, Pentecostal preacher Granny didn’t allow me to listen to secular music. Music that wasn’t religious was considered worldly, and worldly things guaranteed you a spot in hell right next to Satan and all his imps. But Whitney was the exception. Whitney’s gospel-infused powerhouse of a voice made the unholy holy. Every year, my family traveled to a convention in Miami. I was very young and don’t remember what kind of convention it was, but knowing my family, it was most likely a church convention. And every year, my cousins and I joined dozens of other children in a choir as we belted out “I believe the children are our future . . .” during our performance of Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All” for the convention’s attendees. Back at one family member or another’s house, my cousins and I danced and scream-sang to the mountain tops as her videos played on cable shows like BET’s Video Soul with Donnie Simpson. The adults in my family loved her too. Granny and her sisters would sit around talking and singing as Whitney blared from the stereo. Whitney belonged to all of us.
After pallbearers carried Whitney down the aisle and out of New Hope Baptist Church in her gold casket, while her song “I Will Always Love You” played, I decided to wash my hair. I assembled all my hair products, including a conditioner whose label only contained writing in Spanish and was supposed to miraculously detangle my relaxed-part natural hair. My hair was prone to forming knots and becoming matted when wet because I hadn’t gotten a perm in months. I was trying to give my hair a break from the chemicals and heat. After washing my hair, it took me three hours to delicately detangle it. My hair was still wet and unstyled, I was tired of fighting. On the day we said goodbye to Whitney, in the mirror where Granny and I had once stood doing our hair, I said goodbye to my relaxed tresses.
They say you shouldn’t make any major decisions within the first year after someone you love passes away. Cutting my hair was a major decision, but it wasn’t a rash one. I’ve never regretted it. Granny wasn’t there to tell me, “A woman’s hair is her glory” or to ask, “When are you going to get your hair done?” If she were alive, I don’t think she’d approve of my hair. She loved long hair and disliked things that made women look masculine. But I no longer loved my hair. It no longer loved me. Granny would most likely have said my new cut made me look like a boy, like a bulldagger, like a lezbeen.
I thought I was beautiful and free.
◆
My hair. The thing my mother Cheryl noticed when I entered her Florida hospice room. The thing that let her know I was not at death’s door.
When Cheryl saw me, she did not speak. Instead, she smiled and stared at my pinned-up afro.
“Do you wanna touch it?”
She nodded.
I walked over to her bed and knelt beside her. She lifted her hand and patted my crown. So much had changed since we’d last seen each other. I had gained weight and she had dwindled down to the size of a child. I was in remission from breast cancer. She was dying from it. I did not need to wear a mask or have my temperature taken before entering medical facilities the last time we saw each other. Now, we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The last time I’d seen her, she had stood beside me as we took pictures and talked and hugged. Now, she was bedbound and could not sit up without assistance. She could not hug me and could barely talk. But my hair was the same. Still the thing we both recognized. Still there.
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I have been at war with my hair for years. Sometime between high school and college, I developed what might have been diagnosed as the hair pulling disorder trichotillomania—except I never went to a therapist to figure it out because no one I knew went to therapy. We did not go to therapy when I was too depressed to get out of bed or do school work. We did not go to therapy when I cried all day. We did not go to therapy when I wanted to leave this world and when I tried to leave. Instead, Granny prayed. She read Bible scriptures and wrote in the spirit in her black and white composition notebook, and she prayed for God’s intercession and guidance. And we most certainly did not go to therapy for something as seemingly benign as me pulling my hair out. Besides, it wasn’t my mind or hair that Granny was worried about.
“Yo eyes gon’ stay that way if you keep doing that,” she would say as she watched me looking up at whatever strand of hair I was pulling on at the moment.
Pulling my hair was as satisfying, as comforting, as squeezing the small white towel I’d used as a blankie for years as a kid, and then returned to after Granny developed Alzheimer’s. And like a blankie, I suppose hair pulling is how I dealt with an anxiety and whirlpool of emotions I didn’t know how else to channel. I’d grab a strand and run my index and forefinger along its length, feeling the roughness of its shaft and the sharpness of its end—so sharp it pricked my skin. I craved the pulling and the sting of the sharp ends. I’d break a strand by pulling it or by repeatedly folding it over itself until the strand snapped and was much shorter than its neighbors. I did this so often, snapped and pulled so much of my hair, that I created unintended bangs and asymmetrical cuts. When I used to get relaxers, I often wore a straight style in which the front and left side of my hair were much shorter than the right side and back. I’d part my hair on the right, wear the right side of my hair hanging down and blend my fake bang into the hair on my left side before swooping or pinning the section behind my ear. As my fingers and time wore on, my hair pulling resulted in more hair loss and unevenness throughout my head. I went from an accidental asymmetrical cut to unintended layers.
I generally did not pull my hair in public or in spaces where I was expected to act and look normal—like work and school. But the evidence of my secret always gave me away.
While sitting in a college Spanish class, a friend examined my front hairs, which were much shorter than the rest of the hair on my head.
“Your hair looks like a Cabbage Patch Kid took a bite out of it,” she opined. She never explained why she thought my uneven hair looked like the handiwork of an innocent looking Cabbage Patch Kid as opposed to that of the devilish Chucky or even an animal.
During the summer after my second year of law school, one of my internship supervisors invited everyone in the office to her house for a BBQ. It was warm, but very windy that day. By that time, I had pulled out so much hair from a spot on the top of my head that only a patch of short hairs remained, which I camouflaged by combing nearby longer hairs over it. But that day, my hair was no match for Mother Nature. As the wind blew, my perfect hairdo came undone, and my little hairs stood straight as toothpicks and flew all over the place. A few interns giggled and yelled as they tried to lay my hairs down and make them stay put—all to no avail. They were so animated you would’ve thought they were shooing a bee away from me. Although I also laughed, I was embarrassed to have a bunch of folks fussing over me. I was one of only three Black interns. The last thing I wanted was for white people to be chasing—and judging—my hair. I also didn’t want to field any questions about why my hair was so short in that area.
I stopped pulling my hair once I cut it and went natural. When I finally grew it out, it was full and healthy. I suppose my hair had finally come home to itself. It no longer had to fight to be something it wasn’t.
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As if on cue, my eyes welled with tears, and I let out a sob as soon as I entered Sister Christine’s North Carolina hospital room and saw her lying there. Her eyes were closed, and a respirator tube was in her mouth. When I’d left New York the day before, I knew I was coming to see my godmother for the last time. “We’re just waiting for everyone to get here and then we’re gonna take her off life support,” her son had told me. And yet, I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw—for what years of chemotherapy for stomach cancer had done to her. It was her nearly bald head, with only white peach fuzz covering its periphery, that had shocked and pained me. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were also gone. She looked so different and yet so familiar. She even looked like Granny, her best friend, who’d died eight years earlier. Her face and downy scalp could’ve belonged to any elderly Black person. Cancer and age had erased the rigid signifiers of difference.
Sister Christine had spent years trying to hold onto her hair. When she was first diagnosed with cancer several years earlier, she’d go to the salon and have the stylist brush her hair up into a ponytail and then glue in extensions around her ponytail to create a straight bang all the way across her forehead and a large, ornately styled bun at the top of her head. Sometimes the bun was curly. Sometimes a single braid was wrapped around its base. Whatever the variation, Sister Christine’s hair was always perfectly coiffed as if she were going to some fancy event. Her hairstyle would last a few weeks, kept in place at night with a silk scarf. Over time, the glue or the tension from her ponytail or the chemo took her hair out at the crown of her head, and she could no longer wear her bang-and-ponytail combo. So, she began wearing wigs. Whether they were short or shoulder-length, her wigs were always curly and ranged in color from pecan to chocolate. But we never discussed what was happening underneath them. I’d never seen her without her wig or a headscarf on. She’d spent so much time and effort covering up her hair loss that it was easy to forget she was terminally ill, and that death wasn’t so far away.
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One woman wrote online that she only had “a mere wisp of hair” after starting Anastrozole. Although I had far more hair than “a mere wisp,” my tresses had not escaped unscathed. I compared before and after photos of myself. In the photo of me on my first day of radiation, my shoulder-length natural hair is freshly blown out and in a full twist out. In the photo of me a couple months after radiation ended and once I’d started taking Anastrozole, my hair is thinner, dryer, shorter, grayer—a puny knock-off of its former self. “Yeah, I see what you mean,” a friend said with pity when I showed her both photos.
My hair had thinned and broken off in several areas. I tried styling it to cover and blend the thinning areas, but they kept spreading further and further out. Pretty soon, the front half of my hair was much shorter than the back half. I had a very unsexy mullet—which is very hard to manage when you’re a Black person with tightly coiled hair. I began to dread wash day because of how badly my wet hair tangled. I took matters into my own unprofessional hands by giving myself several progressively shorter “trims” to even my hair out and make it fuller. After months of my botched haircuts, I finally went to a natural hair salon to get it fixed.
“Who did this to you?” my stylist, a woman with short, curly blonde hair, asked as she ran her fingers through my head.
“See, what had happened was . . . me. I did it to myself.”
◆
“I don’t see any thinning,” my dermatologist, a Black woman, told me. “I have thinning hair,” she said, referring to her hair that had thinned to the point of her scalp showing throughout her head. “Your hair is not thinning.”
Although we are both Black, our hair textures were very different. Her fine hair and much looser curl pattern meant that her scalp could more easily be seen through her thinning hair; you didn’t need to manipulate her hair in any way to notice it. My hair was coarse and more tightly coiled—more packed together. Her hair hung down. My hair grew out and up. Therefore, my hair thinning wasn’t as easy to notice. But I noticed.
“But there’s less hair in this section. It’s now too short and thin for me to style like I did before.”
“Maybe the hair strands are thinner in that area.”
I gave her an Are you serious? look in response. I was telling her the sky is blue and she was asking me, What sky?
“And I don’t think this medication causes hair thinning. I have to look it up.”
It was already bad enough that she was discounting my experiences and acting as if my thinning hair was a figment of my imagination, but her jumping to conclusions without having looked up my medication’s most common side effects ignited a special brand of fury in me.
“I’ve already spoken to my oncologist about this, and she recommended I see a dermatologist.”
She ended the visit by recommending that I use some expensive shampoo for hair loss.
◆
Finally, I decided to get braids to “give my hair a rest.” It had been nearly ten years since I’d last had my hair braided, when a stylist had braided it before installing a sew-in weave. The braids and weave were so tight that I went back to the stylist and had her take them out after only two weeks. Instead of my hair recovering from the trauma of relaxers and weekly blowouts at the Dominican hair salon, I’d ended up with bald spots and inflamed hair follicles. I cut my hair off and went natural not long after that. But I was optimistic this time around. I was only getting braids—not a weave.
I found a braiding salon nearby. It was in the owner’s basement, where Nollywood movies played in the background. Five hours after I’d arrived, I emerged with thin box braids all the way down to my butt. It was the first time I’d ever had braids that long. The first time I’d worn a braided style since college. My long braids made me feel sexy, invincible, fabulous. It was all short-lived.
I took the braids out a month later. As I washed my hair in the shower, clumps of hair came out in my hand. I cried as I finally accepted that I would have to cut my hair. It was ridiculous to keep holding on.
As soon as I got out of the shower, I called Junior, the barber of a woman whose haircut I had admired in the train station a month earlier. “Gurl, I love your hair! It is fabulous!” I told her, the way Black women often do when we see another sista’s beautiful hairdo. Junior had an opening for the next day. Instead of telling him what kind of cut I wanted, I just said I wanted a cut. That was a mistake. Junior cut all my hair off, down to my scalp. You know it’s bad when your barber or stylist tries to prepare you before you see yourself. “It’ll look better once it grows out and you cut it a few times,” he said before turning my chair around to face the mirror. That was not reassuring. He mentioned something about my hair’s weird, inconsistent texture. That observation wasn’t surprising, given all my post-cancer hair drama. I didn’t like the cut. More importantly, I didn’t like the person I saw staring back at me in the mirror.
I’d had short hair before. Ten years earlier, when I was ten years younger and many pounds lighter. I didn’t feel empowered or beautiful with this big chop as I had with the first. It’s one thing to cut your hair off because you want to and quite another to cut it off because you have to. Others reflected my insecurities back to me. Some co-workers didn’t comment on my cut and either looked uncomfortably at my head or avoided looking at it altogether. Another asked me if I liked my cut, which made me think she did not like my cut. I didn’t feel pretty or feminine. But it’s ridiculous to keep holding on to the past, holding on to hair that no longer wants to be kept.
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Things linger in us and destroy us from the inside out—even seemingly benign things or things meant to help us. Like the phenobarbital doctors began prescribing for my seizures when I was six months old until I was in elementary school. In my late twenties, long after I’d stopped taking the medication, a doctor I’d gone to about my polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) noticed I had a history of seizures. He said studies had shown that phenobarbital given to little girls caused them to develop PCOS years later.
I think about the things that linger in us. Like the relaxers I began getting when I was a child. The ones I got religiously, every six to eight weeks. Studies have shown that hair relaxers and other hair straightening chemicals are linked to an increased risk of developing breast, ovarian, and uterine cancers and fibroids. Because Black women use these products more often than other races and start using them at earlier ages, we’re more at risk than other groups. This is yet another penalty Black women pay for trying to exist in a society that tells us straight hair is the standard because our hair’s natural texture is considered unprofessional and unacceptable. Almost every Black woman I know has had relaxers at some point in her life. Almost every Black woman I know has had fibroids. I think about my mother and her grandmother, who also had breast cancer. I think about the relaxers they also used.
I think about the things that linger in us. I wonder if relaxers made my body rebel—made it turn against itself and grow cells that multiplied and traveled rather than sitting quietly and behaving.
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When Junior the barber disappeared, I had to find someone new to cut my hair. As a woman, it’s hard to find a good barbershop. I prefer getting my hair cut at a barbershop rather than a hair salon because the cuts are less expensive; I don’t have to spend all day there; and I can book an appointment on short notice. But barbershops aren’t always women friendly. Instead, they’re usually full of men who indulge in locker room talk about women that I’d rather skip. Not to mention the sexual harassment women experience. I’ve stopped going to several male barbers because they kept flirting and asking me out. Another male barber would show up to my appointments late, smelling like weed and his eyes bloodshot. But his cuts were so fierce! I’d walk out of there with all kinds of designs on my head. No two cuts were ever the same. But the last straw was him telling me about his night of sex, women, and porn—and showing me pictures on his phone.
After much Googling, I found a new barber—a stern-faced Trinidadian with locs that sweep the floor when they’re not wrapped around his head or in an elaborate ponytail. It’s a small shop, only two barbers, where international soccer games are always playing on the mounted TV. This time, I had a plan. I didn’t just show up and say, “Cut my hair.” I brought my barber a picture of Black actress Denée Benton, who portrays the character of writer Peggy Scott in HBO’s period drama “Gilded Age.” “I want this haircut,” I tell him. Rather than making me practically bald, this cut entails making the sides of my hair very low while leaving much more hair at the top. The cut is topped off with a side part, because I must always have a side part to add a little pizazz.
My new barber didn’t mention my thinning hair, weird hair texture or ask any questions. He simply worked his magic. And then he put on a pair of latex gloves and rubbed pomade into my hair like he was giving me a head massage. He then rubbed a hair sponge over my head to give me small curls. I looked fly. I felt fly. Too fly to go straight home. I’d finally found my perfect cut and barber.
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I miss my hair. I miss the way it swelled and multiplied when moisture was in the air. I miss its sponginess. The way it smelled. The way I could trace the seasons of my life along its strands. I miss its versatility. I miss the freedom of not having to have someone else do my hair. I miss the way Black women would come up to me and say, “Your hair looks so good! What do you use in it?” I miss trying new natural hair products and comparing the results with my friends. But like grief, hair changes over time and settles us into a new normal.
My hair is an archive of my grief. A collection of who and what I’ve loved and lost. A reminder of what I’ve survived.
