Ugh, just had a 2 sausage burritos meal from McD’s. Now I feel gross. I’m telling you, the more and more I think about this (veganism), the more and more it makes sense. It’s quite annoying…like taking the Matrix’s red pill by accident.
I was at my physical therapy appointment today and was telling the PT about all of my ailments.
“…and there was one time, I had a sinus infection for 6 weeks,” I said, stretching my hamstrings. “It’s gotten to the point now that doctors just let me pick out my own antibiotics.” My PT laughed. “I swear, I look like a normal 23-year-old, but I feel like I’m 80.”
“That’s not good,” she said, half listening. I agreed and started to think while stretching. I feel like I’m 80 years old. I currently can’t do any physical exercise outside of swimming–and even that’s iffy. In the last year, I have numerous servere sinus infections, pinched nerves, migraines, severe allergy attacks, and not to mention my knee/foot/leg injury. I’ve gained 20lbs this year. I have very noticeable body acne and blemishes EVERYWHERE.
What is my body trying to tell me? As I mentioned in a previous post, I had this same revelation when I went natural. Let me give you a little lesson in “chemical relaxers”:
Most (but not all!) young African-American girls have a relaxer at least once in their lifetime. For many, it’s the only way to have their hair. For others, including myself, the physical and mental damage of the relaxing process is discovered and ultimately abandoned. Here’s an excerpt from an interesting article:
Today, African Americans spend an estimated $9 billion a year on hair-care products in an effort to fry it, dye it, lock it up, weave it, or make it lay flat and smooth, according to industry estimates. Still, black women often debate whether certain hair styles — cornrows, locks or Afros — hold them back in professional work settings such as financial and legal firms or in broadcast media.
It hasn’t hurt congressional Delegates Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., and Donna M.C. Christensen, D-Virgin Islands, who both display close-cropped, chemically unprocessed “natural” hairdos.
Still, it’s a serious enough concern that one woman wrote to the “Ask the White Guy” blog at the DiversityInc.com Web site and asked whether her natural hairstyle would prevent her from climbing the corporate ladder.
The “White Guy,” Luke Visconti, replied: “There’s no doubt in my mind that Black people have been overlooked for promotions because of natural hair or darker skin color. Psychological tests show that people most trust people who look like them. Since white men run most corporations in this country, straightened hair and/or lighter skin is going to be an advantage (disturbing, but let’s keep it real).”
Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/10/09/76915/for-many-black-women-hair-tells.html
I didn’t go natural by choice. I started getting relaxers when I was 11 years old–due to my mother and grandmother’s hand. My hair over the course of 7 years broke off and thinned, but we still persisted. It was the only way to go (so we thought). And it was “easier to manage”. Halfway through my relaxer journey, I started having a very itchy scalp in one section of my head.
“Aw girl, you just got a nervous condition,” my beautician would say, dismissing me with her hand. “You just have to stop stressing out.”
“She always was a nervous child,” my mother would agree. I was 14.
By the time I hit 16, I decided the perm was too strong and sought a its lesser cousin–the texturizer. This required me to cut off all of my hair into a short curly fro. I was devastated.
By the time I hit 18, I could no longer handle the thin, brittle hair and dry, irritated scalp. I had braids with extensions put in my hair right before I left for college and kept my hair braided for a year. But something was happening. Every time I took my braids out for a wash (and then to be rebraided…I didn’t know what to do with it), I found that I was in love with this new stuff coming out of my scalp. It was soft, and kinky and….beautiful. What in the hell was it?
Google was my friend. Through the internet, I found a realm of black women that were “natural”, no chemicals at all. And they were rocking cute braids, afro puffs, curls (I could curl my kinky hair???), afros, and twists. They had elegant styles, fun and flirty styles and just “going to the grocery store” everyday styles. The year was 2005 and the site was nappturality.com. I was hooked and swore off relaxers from that day forth.
The beginning was rough. I had to undo years of training–that my hair wasn’t beautiful and couldn’t be managed. I cried a lot–when was it going to gain length? Why was it doing this? And why wasn’t it doing that? But the online support that I had was priceless. Women that I hadn’t met (and may never meet) reached out and told me that everything was ok, it was a normal process and shared their stories to help others get through it. They dubbed chemical relaxers “creamy crack”–appropriately, because the need to conform to America’s idea of beauty is addicting (tanning, anyone?).
I went through the proverbial detox and slowly gained confidence in myself to style my hair on my own. My family watched from afar–I’d always been weird anyway. When my mother saw that I was successful, she decided to stop with the relaxer and start with a texturizer. I reminded her that it was still a chemical, but she’s content to use that. Everyone has their own path–just like meat eaters.
The point is, that realization had to come from within. I was exposed to natural hair by accident (because it was NOT around in my circles when I was young) and had to learn from my own mistakes, frustrations, and triumphs, that this was something I wanted to change in my life. I had to learn the ugly history of why African American women relaxed their hair and the reason it is still a practice today. And I had to deal with the stares, rejection from the opposite sex (a whole ‘nother post, y’all) and ridicule for going against the pack (so to speak).
But, as I sit here now tossing my sun kissed dreadlocks, I made it through. And I’m starting to think my vegan story is going to sound a lot like the one above.
~Toodles.
