Remember that episode...

I refer to episodes of Sex and the City quite often, and it might be annoying unless you have, like me, watched every episode and you know that there is truth in that show that just fits the situation. So here I go...

Do you remember the Episode (An American Girl in Paris part II, to be exact) when Carrie reaches into her purse and discovers a hole in the lining? She's sitting in the museum in Paris where her (mean and awful) boyfriend's new exhibit is being previewed, and he has left her alone. She reaches into the lining and finds the necklace that she had thought was lost. I believe she said she had bought it at a street fair in the Bronx or something, and that it cost "like nothing" but it was just...her. It reminded her of who she really was. She was not some obnoxious artist's girlfriend, living (practically) alone in a foreign city, always there to save him from himself...she was the girl with messy hair and weird clothes who can wear Chanel with a cheap necklace from the street fair. So she runs from the museum, and the awesome French rap song starts...

That was a long and circumlocutory [awesome word: look it up] way of beginning this post, but it just felt right.

So I have rediscovered my hair. My natural, pretty messy, curly-ish blob of hair. It looks disgusting once I've slept on it and if it gets rained on and just sometimes even if I try really hard to make it look nice, just because. It can't be controlled like flat-ironed hair, and some days the chaos is so great, you have no choice but to succumb to it. When you least expect it, it will look really really great for no reason. It doesn't really look like anyone else's hair that I've ever seen, and you need to know what it wants to make it happy. And here I have been: wasting it. Ignoring it. Forcing it to be something it is not.

It wasn't until someone (J) mentioned that he just loved it so much more when it was itself--and he said this several times--that I decided to try it again. And I remembered who I was.

Sometimes all it takes to find yourself is to do something as natural as allowing your hair to do whatever it wants.

And sometimes you  need someone or something to remind you.

It's always meant so much to me that J liked my hair best its natural way, because straight hair really has been the norm, and in high school and college people favored it that way. He says my hair is "not like everyone else's" and that is why he likes it. I think that in many ways I have some things in common with my hair...and maybe that's why he likes me.