Natural Hair & the Audacity of Hopelessness
Hair care & vanity in the era of climate change.

There are two things I’ve lived with my entire life: curly hair and anxiety.
The first was wrangled in painful weekly sessions under my mother’s brush. I learned to see my hair as an uncooperative and devilish thing, a source of pain and struggle. My mother tired of going to battle, and passed the baton to me at 11 years old. Strangely, I’d beg her to rake her brush through my hair one more time, hoping this time it would finally stay untangled so that my own arms wouldn’t have to ache.
As an adolescent, I taught myself how to do my hair — comb it in the shower, and so on and so forth — and then promptly forgot about it. Until the 2017 election, it had been over a decade since I’d thought much about my hair routine. My hair wasn’t particularly happy with me, and I didn’t particularly care.
The second thing, anxiety, was imbued in me from a time too early to remember. Even in the womb, the blueprint was there, and then as a babe it was reinforced. I have always been deeply worried. There is always something to worry about, from the freckle on my pinky finger to the heat death of the universe.
Worrying doesn’t impede my livelihood, though it does affect my life. I grind my teeth through nightmares, tremble when confronted, and spend a lot of time at home. It works okay for me, or — it worked okay for me. Then climate change deniers took power again, and I haven’t been able to muster up any hope for quite some time.
Some of you might be thinking — things have been going Wrong, generally, for about fifty millennia now, so what are you so upset about? I would argue that things have been getting gradually Wronger, and they will reach peak Wrongness within the next half-century, if not sooner. It’s a bold claim, and yet if you do some quick googling you’ll find that scientists are in agreement. I am worried about that.
It’s too much to think about, a lot of the time — most of the time. So after our most current change in regime, when my anxiety around climate change spiked, I began to search for everything, anything else to keep me preoccupied. I began to spend an inordinate amount of time returning to that other thing that follows me everywhere: my hair.
It turns out that there is so much more to hair care than I was able to learn as a teenager, when the natural hair movement was still in its toddler phase. I remember hair typing, pineapples, and fancy conditioners. Now the amount of information is overwhelming.
Before, I didn’t feel that I had time to even consider catching up with all the latest natural hair techniques. I had work. I had worry-reducing rituals to complete. I had emails to answer, a job to go to.
Hard as I try, I can’t bring myself to really care about any of that anymore. Planning for anything further than a year or a few years into the future feels like absolute nonsense — who are we to dare to worry about retirement when our ecosystem is set up to collapse within our lifetimes?
I’m not worried about debt. I’m not worried about milestones or a 401K. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t be worried — for all I know, those things will still matter in 50 years, but I can’t quite bring myself to believe it, and I certainly can’t bring myself to care.
That frees up a lot of headspace. Suddenly I have all the hours in the world to spend watching YouTube videos about hair. Ask me about the LOC method, shingling versus raking, or the various levels of hold that an edge gel might offer. I can tell you about all of it.
Why focus on hair, of all the possible distractions? Because there is no end to the things that you can learn. Because it feels inherently good to play with your own hair. Because it’s growing endlessly out of my head like a shadow, and if the world is going to end I might as well finally discover what it feels like to have healthy hair.
I have begun to spend gobs of hard-earned cash on hair products, of all things. I’ve always been the type of person to spend hours in a CVS aisle, but now I actually read the labels of the fancy black-owned conditioners to ascertain which one is best for my hair. Then I pick one and go home and settle into my panic room: my marble-tiled shower at home, where I patiently slather product after product onto curl after curl.
They say it makes a difference. I don’t believe that I can truly change a thing about the fate of this planet, unless by “planet” you mean to include a very specific and trivial aspect of it, like say, one woman’s hair.
In the panic room, nothing else matters aside from how soft my hair is at that moment. I can stop thinking, for a while, about the work I need to do, chores I need to finish, errands I need to run. I can stop thinking about how absolutely dreadful it feels to be an American right now, and whether I’m doing enough to force the mammoth corporate machine to grind to a halt.
There is an important task at hand that needs to be completed, and that’s to rinse, moisturize, seal, and moisturize again.
