After high school my body started changing big time. I started getting hair under my chin, dark hair. I have to keep it trimmed. It’s part of my PCOS – Poly Cycstic Ovarian Syndrome. I’m wondering if that is part of why my hair changed. But it’s still thick, wavy, and frizzy no matter what hair cut or conditioners I use.

i had really dreadful hair as a teenager. i was trying really hard to make my wavy hair bone straight with feathered bangs. the bangs usually became curly ‘horns’ in the humidity of new orleans.

in college i discovered what a good hairdresser could do with thick wavy hair! i had short hair, but so well cut that i became a walking advertisement for my hairdresser. I never had to DO much – i stopped using a hairdryer and never did more than wash it. People used to come up to me and compliment my hair. I’m not pretty. I only have a few vanities, and my hair was definitely one of the physical things about me that i really really liked as an adult.

then i got breast cancer for the first time, and due to chemo, my fiance shaved my head and i went bald for almost a year. Being hairless broke my heart. i could do without the boob, but the hair loss was devestating. Funny.

when it came back it was SO CURLY that it was embarrassing. it looked like a BAD 80s perm. After a year or so it went back to normal and once i found a good hairdresser in my new town, i became a major source of business for my stylist. i once went to a competing salon to buy a particular type of shampoo – and they tried to charge me for a haircut – my hair looked so good that they were sure it had just been style.

then i got breast cancer for the second time. this time when my now husband shaved my head we left it in a mohawk for a while. Once again, the loss of my boob wasn’t as upsetting as my hair loss.

now it’s been a couple of years and i’m still bald on top. my hair is thin thin thin. i can deal with the surgeries and chemo and oophrectomy and all of the stress of cancer. i don’t dream about what might have been. But i dream nightly about having my old hair.

Most of my young life, a girl/woman was supposed to have ruler straight hair. Oh, I was ugly because my hair was curly. I tried every product known, home and beauty parlor, including ironing. Nothing would make my hair ruler straight like the girls in Seventeen magazine. I tried getting it cut very short, hoping to cut off the curl. That made it curl more.

My sister went further; she tried to bleach her hair with peroxide. It turned orange.

Then I became a hippie at around 14 and decided to just let my hair grow long and wild.

When I was in about my junior year in high school, the style changed. Now, all the girls who for years had said I was ugly because my hair was curly were getting perms so their hair would look like mind.

Years later, I saw a film of a Malcolm X speech, where he talked about white racists lying in the broiling sun so their skin would turn dark. I am white, but I totally identified with what he said.