My mother will tell you that I came out of the womb with a full head of hair. A few hours after my birth, she could gather it and tie it into a ponytail tightly held on the top of my head. "You should take special care of her hair," strangers would say on the street, in grocery stores, and in the pews of churches, as though it was sacred. By the time I was five, and my scalp was no longer tender and as sensitive to styling, my mother took me to a driveway in our hometown of Harare, Zimbabwe, where women sat in two lines to get their hair weaved into braids. Their eyebrows were raised, and their foreheads looked plastic from the tension of their hair being tugged. The hair braiders, who always had a story to tell to anybody who would listen, didn’t need to look down to know what they were doing. It was part of our culture to have our hair combed, yanked, divided into sections, braided, and burned with fire at the ends to make sure the plaits didn't come undone.

I came to America in the late '90s. Weaves and chemical relaxers (which we called perms) were the sacrifices black girls made for "good" hair. The girls in my middle school who had their edges smoothly slicked down would taunt me about my textured tresses, which my mother braided the night before. "It is so nappy," they'd say under their breaths. As an Americanized teen, I begged my mother to go to the hair salon for a relaxer. When she finally gave in, my full head of hair, so revered back in Zimbabwe, was straightened and damaged until it was too thin to do anything with except hold down with two bobby pins, one at each side. If I had the extra time in the morning, I would pull my hair back with a tiny band or apply gel for a wash-and-go style that looked like ramen noodles once it dried. There was power in fitting in, even if it was fitting in poorly.

When natural hair came back into style for black women years later, I was 21 and single. I was finally old enough to make decisions that didn’t start with my friends and end with a guy's recommendation. I started growing my afro, wearing it shaved down, in twists, or picked out. Every night, I did exhaustive research on how to take care of my texture. I sat in front of my laptop poring over the many YouTube videos, learning all about black hair. I learned how it grew, how to maintain it, how to keep it soft, and how to make it shine. It became something of a ritual — I reserved the last hours of every day treating my natural hair with the TLC I hadn't given it with all those years of relaxers.