I’ve noticed something recently.
The more settled my life becomes, the more I’ve started wearing my natural curls again.
Which is probably a very niche observation unless you’ve spent a significant portion of your adult life using your hair as an emotional support coping mechanism.
Unfortunately, I have.
Looking back, there have been three distinct periods in my life where I’ve dramatically changed my hair, and none of them were really about hair.
The first was mid-2012 when I was heavily pregnant with my eldest daughter.
Up until then, I’d spent nearly ten years straightening my hair. Every wash day was followed by John Frieda’s Frizz Ease, hairdryer, straighteners and a determination to become somebody who naturally woke up with sleek hair despite all available evidence suggesting otherwise.
But as my pregnancy progressed, I found myself thinking about the little girl I was about to meet.
There was a very strong possibility she was going to have curls. And I wanted her to love them.
It suddenly felt strange to spend years teaching my daughter to embrace something that I was putting considerable effort into removing from myself.
So I stopped straightening my hair.
And for a long time, curly hair simply became me.
Those curls saw me through a decade of motherhood, divorce, heartbreak, grief, loss and all the ordinary years in between. When I picture most of the last fourteen years, that’s the version of me I see.
Then, over the last year or so, something shifted.
My life felt like it was sitting at a crossroads. My teaching career no longer felt sustainable, I knew things needed to change, and yet I wasn’t entirely sure what those changes were supposed to look like.
When you feel like that, it’s funny what happens.
You can’t instantly change your career. You can’t immediately solve every problem. You can’t fast-forward through uncertainty.
But you can book a hair appointment.
So I did.
Regularly.
The weekly blow-dries became part of a version of myself that felt polished, put together and somehow different.
Looking back, I think part of me believed that the blow-dried version of me hadn’t experienced some of the lows that the natural curly version had.
Which is obviously complete nonsense.
They were literally the same person. One just had heat damage.
But when you’re searching for change, sometimes changing the packaging feels easier than changing your life.
The interesting thing is that once I actually started making changes to my life, I stopped feeling the need to change my hair.
I left teaching, started a new career and began finding a little more space for myself in everyday life.
And somewhere along the way, the curls came back.
Not because I’d made a conscious decision to embrace my natural hair again. I simply stopped feeling the need to look like a different version of myself.
There’s something rather comforting about that.
For a while, I’d associated straight hair with being polished and put together. As though having a weekly blow-dry might somehow make the rest of my life feel equally well organised.
It didn’t, obviously.
But now, as I find myself settling into a different pace of life, I’m enjoying looking in the mirror and recognising the version of myself I’ve known for most of my adult life.
Curls, frizz and all.
I still enjoy having my hair blow-dried occasionally. I haven’t developed a lifelong objection to straighteners or decided that natural hair is somehow more authentic.
I just don’t feel the same need to change it.
And before anyone points it out, yes, I did say there were three significant hair transformations and I’ve only mentioned two.
That’s because the less that is said about my blonde phase, the better.
Some things belong firmly in the archives.
