Some people are known for being good athletes. Some people are known for their acting ability. Some people write poetry, juggle or bake prize-winning cakes. I, on the other hand, am talented in none of those regards. My only defining attribute, I'm afraid, is my hair.
It's pretty easy to spot me in elementary school class photos. Amidst the floral jumpers and platinum braids, I'm the one with the brown, curly afro. I'm usually in the second or third row, jammed between two overweight boys in sweatsuits, the size of my hair having forced me to surrender my height-appropriate seat in the front row so as not to block the kids behind me.
One would hope that after years of such humiliation, this trend could be buried in family photo albums and forgotten.
Not so. I've noticed a similar trend among my various identification cards. In my driver's license, student ID and passport, my hair takes up more room in the picture than my face.
Don't get me wrong, I love my hair. But it's been a long road to such self-confidence. Just like a talented gymnast must master shaky somersaults before he can turn flips, it's taken years of practice to turn this tangled mass of curls into what it is today.
My Shirley Temple curls stopped being cute sometime around third grade, when I no longer could wear turtle-neck shirts without looking like a Q-Tip. I had the charming distinction of being the only girl in fourth grade who needed half a can of Aqua Net to keep her ponytail in place.
Adolescence was even worse. I waged war on my head for nearly an hour every morning before school, blow-drying, straightening, spraying and flattening my mane until I looked like the other smooth-haired girls in my class.
Then I went to summer camp and found that there wasn't much time before flag-raising to manipulate my hair out of its natural state. It was that summer, before eighth grade, that I discovered other girls in the world have curly hair, too. Instead of repressing their curls, they celebrated their jumbled wilderness. Imagine my dismay when, in the bathroom of a wooden cabin in the Poconos, I discovered a whole line of products actually intended to accentuate hair like mine.
Yesterday, at the bus stop, I caught the girl standing next to me staring at my head.
"How do you get your hair to do that?" she asked admirably, her own hair lying limp against her shoulders.
I thought for a moment about the three minutes that it took me to step out of the shower that morning, shake my head, scrunch gel into my hair and go. I compared that routine to the years I spent rising before dawn to break my roots so that I could look like my new fan.
"My hair?" I repeated, smiling as I thought about those grade school photos and the ID in my pocket. "I guess it just comes naturally"
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