Mane Attraction: The Law of Reciprocity

This is the first in a series about the glo­ri­ous hair crown­ing our heads, in all its many incar­na­tions, whether nat­ural or oth­er­wise. No exclu­sion­ary behav­ior allowed. Just work­ing the do and mak­ing it work for you.

Do unto oth­ers as you’d like done unto you.  You have to crawl before you walk.  Nat­ural is as Nat­ural Does right?

All the above so true, yet it’s taken me all of two and 1/2 years to fully com­pre­hend or accept the ease behind that knowledge.

And so we come to The Law of reci­procity:

An exchange in which all par­ties have a mutual under­stand­ing of their rights and oblig­a­tions. Rela­tions between mem­bers of an imme­di­ate fam­ily or between spouses are based on oblig­a­tions such as obe­di­ence or respect. Rela­tions can be forged through gifts or per­sonal favors and bring with them oblig­a­tions and expec­ta­tions. For every action, some­thing is expected in return.

Those who do favors are highly esteemed; they are rec­og­nized as peo­ple who have respect for those around them. Every pre­vi­ous or cur­rent sit­u­a­tion pro­duces expec­ta­tions for future behav­ior on the part of the giver and gift recipient.

My name is Tynisha Leon and up until 2 months ago, I had been treat­ing my hair (very) badly.

This was not my intent. In fact I thought I was doing right by my frag­ile locks. I was uti­liz­ing the tools/products at hand, even employ­ing the polar­iz­ing Den­man brush . I was work­ing my way through Google lists, Youtube chan­nels, var­ied forums, Fokti pages and ran­dom, if not entirely help­ful library reads.

The mes­sages became convoluted.

I should have known bet­ter. Who bet­ter than a jaded news­pa­per reporter to under­stand the hot lure of believ­ing every­thing you read—much less see?

I evolved into a prod­uct junkie unnec­es­sar­ily. Two self-inflicted Dark and Lovely box col­ors later, 6-inches (you know I had the nerve to be mea­sur­ing dam­age) had been trun­cated into a hum­bling 2.

The dif­fi­culty was not in start­ing over, two inches does not a Cae­sar make. The dif­fi­culty, was in not hav­ing really learned any­thing beyond the fact that my hair doesn’t love color as much as I’d like it too. That was the least of it, but I had no hold on the knowl­edge that doing noth­ing was as bad as doing every­thing, and that all at once.

At around the same time I dis­cov­ered a skin­care reg­i­men that worked, and a way of lis­ten­ing to my skin that informed, I began to have an inkling of what TLC with regard to hair­care could and should mean. But it was only after my cross-country road trip to Sedona, Ari­zona, that I dis­cov­ered a more natural/environmental peace of mind and my Nat­ural hair­care rela­tion­ship truly began.

And it had every­thing to do with let­ting my hair be. No more try­ing to coif the heights of Rus­tic Beauty or rock wash and gos like the lovely Afro­bella. My hair just wanted to be left alone and I obliged. I hid under corn­rows for 10 days of my trip. I oiled with a nightly balm of Cas­tor and rose­mary oil. When I released them, my inten­tion was to replait, but then I had this image you see in the above photo where my hair was doing nice things and it was happy and I had an epiphany.

My hair had for­given me in far less time than it took for me to inflict unnec­es­sary dam­age.  I could learn a les­son or two from that. I can’t say that repeated trans­gres­sions would have elicited the same per­sonal response.

Per­son­ally, I would have left the build­ing. And now that I think of it, mem­o­ries of those wads of hair fill­ing brushes, combs and my shower stall would cer­tainly amount to a slow good-bye.

Still, just maybe we are so tied together that my hair could not really for­give me until I had for­given myself by mak­ing the nec­es­sary daily changes.

I’m not say­ing every­thing was per­fect, but my hair felt dif­fer­ent, moved dif­fer­ently.  The elu­sive shine was there, the elas­tic­ity was present and the end held on to a lovely tight coil.  And so I con­tin­ued the trend.

I’ll say it again: my hair is a chal­lenge. But I’ve never not been a chal­lenge. Too much time on my hands, too much space in my head for dreams, and too much world to explore and be curi­ous about have assured that. I can be brave on a dime, and appar­ently my hair prefers a dime bud­get because it responds best to a sim­ple reg­i­men (look out for an upcom­ing post).

There is cur­rently an awe­some con­ver­sa­tion hap­pen­ing over at Black Girl With Long Hair about per­sonal reg­i­mens.  We are so unique as women. Whether it’s skin tones, hair tex­tures etc. When I cut my hair for the third time around, I still wasn’t any wiser to what my hair needed. But there were voices, and those voices were one more attrac­tive than the other. Some were loud, oth­ers sooth­ing, and some too unique to place. And I took every­thing I read and put it all together and called it hair­care. That was my first and last mistake.

My hair is unique. Not so much in tex­ture— shout out to SummerOrchid1 who did some­thing lovely for my hair esteem.

My hair is unique to me in its rather trau­matic life story up to this point. The early “creamy crack” appli­ca­tion was all of Revlon Super. The opin­ions were real and cut­ting–“girl, mek you hair so course!”–and retold often enough to still be hurt­ful–“You know I had to slap some perm ina she head.”

From the moment of your big (or lit­tle) chop your hair really does breathe a big sigh of relief. It may never fit into the mold of any cur­rent hair fash­ion or pre­vail­ing sen­ti­ment, and if you were any­thing like me then your hair esteem might def­i­nitely need to be raised.

And that’s why most nat­u­rals refer to it as jour­ney and not destination.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Hi there, I’m Tynisha Leon, writer, mango-lover, founder and Editor-in-Chief of DASHEEN mag­a­zine — the online des­ti­na­tion where Cul­ture. Feeds. Imag­i­na­tion! If you seek to inno­vate, pro­mote and/or con­tribute to posi­tioning a Caribbean peo­ple and gen­er­a­tion most pos­i­tively then link me! Bless!

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