Oh boy what a fuckin’ rollercoaster it’s been since the last time I posted. Let me tell you how my hair went from making me cry to making me feel pleased and excited again.
So. In my last post, I explained how I realised I really needed to bite the bullet and wash my hair, and how I went about doing that. However, it turns out I had missed a crucial step.
See, when my hair (and I think most Type 3/4 hair) gets wet, it tangles up as it dries. I knew this intellectually, but I didn’t think about the implications of that – specifically, that all the loose hair on my head would tangle with the rest, without caring about which loc they should be in.
I didn’t notice anything for weeks, but then I found I couldn’t really run my hand through my hair at the back. I figured it wasn’t that much of a big deal, until the day I washed my hair again in preparation for my first attempt at a retwist and called my loctician.
I got her on video call, sectioned my hair into three (right side, left side, and back) and showed her what we were dealing with. I think the best way to describe her reaction might be ‘mildly horrified’.
Because I had washed my hair and not done anything else to it, all the hair that become loose at the roots from the washing had started to tangle with each other – meaning that I no longer had individual locs at the back of my head. They had all combined themselves, and what I was left with was a big matted piece of hair with the ends of my locs sticking out.
I panicked real hard as my loctician described what she was seeing to me and I felt around with my hand and realised that it was completely accurate. I begged her to tell me what to do, and she said I just needed to pull them apart. But it was really, really difficult. I managed to do one at the nape of my neck; she told me how to twist it, and I did, but when I tried to move on to another the enormity of the task overwhelmed me. So she said to try the front for a bit instead while she thought about how to approach the back.
I did this fairly easily at first – my curl pattern there is a bit looser, so it hadn’t tangled as much. But as I got round to the sides, I realised that the roots there had started to mat as well. It was happening all over my head. I realise as I’m writing this that I’m taking on the cadence of a horror story, but that’s what it felt like. It was as if I was discovering something horrendous had attached itself to me.
I have some pictures below; they don’t really represent how it felt, but they should give you an idea.
Notice how me pulling up these three or four locs also pulls up half a dozen more at the side of my head – this is because they are all connected by hair.
This probably sounds melodramatic, but my hair is one of the few things about my appearance that I love without reservation – maybe the only thing – so I was devastated that I seemed to have ruined it.
But. I got over it. I mourned it for a couple of days, and then I reconciled myself to the worst case scenario: I’d have to shave it off. I let myself consider the reality of it, and it wouldn’t be so bad (I have daydreamed about cutting it all off quite often). Plus, hair grows back.
After consulting with the other people she worked with, my loctician said she was going to talk me through separating the back of my hair as best as I could, since I wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing. That day, before the call, I worked on separating the front and sides of my head myself. It was hard at first – partly because it was painful. When I say ‘separating’, what I mean is literally pulling parts of my hair away from each other – essentially just pulling my own hair. But I am at heart a very stubborn person, and I had entered ‘fuck it’ mode. I was going to separate my hair back into locs if it killed me.
Luckily, it didn’t kill me. I sorted out the bits I could see, and when my loctician called, she told me where to focus first at the back and gave me a huge amount of moral support as I listened to myself break the strands of my hair apart. She also told me that my scalp was getting red, which was unsurprising. We sorted out the back left side together, and then she told me I could do the right side myself because it couldn’t be any harder than that. It actually was, but I let her get back to her other clients and I did it anyway.
Let me try to describe it. Imagine you have two pieces of rope, one in each hand. But, inbetween the pieces of rope is a kind of webbing of thin strings. You need to divide the two ropes completely, and the only way you can do that is by pulling – no scissors. Now imagine you have five or six ropes, and they’re all connected to each other by webbed strings in lots of different ways, and the base is so thickly knotted that you can barely see through it.
Now imagine all that is actually your hair, all attached to your scalp, and every time you pull them apart it hurts a little bit. That’s what I did. It took me three hours to get the back of my head all separated into locs again (and I still think I accidentally left a couple of them combined).
Maybe it caused damage to my hair, maybe it didn’t. I won’t know for months and months. I imagine it’s likely that any damage will show up as weak, thin points in my locs; but those can be repaired in the future.
It was a huge weight off my mind to have done it. If I hadn’t, basically the whole back of my head would have turned into one big loc, which is not the look I’m going for.
Anyway, now my hair was all separated, and I needed to try again to retwist it. I washed it again (only two weeks after the last time, but I figured it was best to start from a clean scalp), sectioned it over into four, and sat down in front of a mirror. Washing it had taken less time than I thought, so I decided I’d get started on the front while I waited for my loctician to call and give me some help with the back.
I’m not sure if I’ve explained exactly what retwisting is before, but if I haven’t, it’s literally just taking your loc by the loose hairs at the root and twisting them together again. Some people only retwist the roots and let the rest be; I retwisted the whole loc to try to give it some shape, since I can’t palmroll. So you twist the hair between your finger and thumb all the way from the root to the end, and then you put a clip at the root so that it doesn’t unravel while you do the rest.
Unusually for my loctician, she didn’t call me when I expected – but I kept on going anyway, because I’m the kind of person who hates leaving things half-finished. I messaged her to ask if she could video-call me, and eventually she called back to apologise because she was stuck in some training. I told her it was fine, and it was; by that point I had done almost all of the left side. Even the back wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be; mainly because I’d put in all that work earlier to separate everything out.
So, I carried on. It took ages – three hours from start to finish. My arms hurt from reaching for the back of my head, and I got frustrated with the clips because I kept getting them caught in the wrong bit of hair or accidentally dropping them, and I was spraying my hair (a mix of rosewater, vitamin E, jojoba oil, and normal water) to keep it damp and sometimes I missed and sprayed my face or back or mirror instead, and I kept worrying that I was twisting my locs in the wrong direction. But I did it, because it had to be done, because it has finally sunk in for me how long I might be stuck here without someone else to help me.
I left the clips in for about three and a half hours while my hair dried to make sure that there wouldn’t be a massive amount of unravelling, and when I took them out my roots stayed mostly where they were. It didn’t look professional, they weren’t the sharpest parts, but it was the best I could do and I think it was a fucking good try.
Have some before and afters of the separation/retwist:
So. Now I know I can do it, I’ve scheduled in my next wash and retwist to be in about five weeks time – but we’ll see how my roots are looking. I might stretch to six weeks if they’re alright.
There are two morals to tonight’s post:
1. ALWAYS separate your locs after washing them, and every couple of days after that to make sure they’re not trying to tangle up with each other!
2. You can do it, even if you don’t want to.
See you in about a month!
H x
Black Fem Geekery 