If you know me well, you’ve probably heard me complain about my hair at least once. It’s thick, curly, and often rather frizzy. It has taken me eighteen years to figure out a way to style it so that it isn’t all over the place, but it also doesn’t take forty minutes to do every morning.

Getting here hasn’t been easy, though. For years, I struggled with taming my hair. In elementary school, I used ponytails and headbands to control it. By high school, I was washing it every night and straightening it every morning, which obviously did not do good things for the state of my locks. I tried all kinds of styles, with varying degrees of success. Most, however, failed pretty miserably.

When braiding your hair became popular, I jumped on it. I figured it would be a great alternative due to the thickness of my hair. No. My hair is so unruly that I couldn’t even get it to braid. Everything I’ve ever tried has gone wrong.

Then, right before my senior year of high school, I decided to try to embrace my curls. I looked online for every DIY curl tutorial I could find and none of them worked. I also discovered a couple of "magical sprays", and I’ve been using them almost every day since.

However, I still have a lot of frizz to manage throughout the day, and it doesn’t always come out perfect. Getting my hair to look good on a daily basis still requires a lot of effort on my part, along with perfect timing as to how wet it is when I do it. Plus, if there’s wind or any sort of humidity, it’s a mess as soon as I step outside.

But I’m okay with it. I spent years longing for the straight, shiny hair that so many of my friends had, and did everything I could to make mine look the same. Today I don’t worry about that. My hair may be a mess most of the time, but it’s my own mess. It may not ever do what I want it to, but it’s uniquely me. No one else has hair just like mine, and frankly, if they did, they’d probably want to shave their head at least once a day. Some people think it looks bad, and maybe it does, but it’s mine, and I love it.

I’d be lying if I said I was always happy with my hair, so really, the title of this article is a lie. There are still days that I worry about how it looks and what other people will think of me. It’s my hair, though. It doesn’t matter what others think because I’m just doing my thing.

In accepting my hair, I constantly had to tell myself that it’s just hair. It doesn’t define me; I define myself. And, since I embraced it and started letting it do whatever it wanted (for the most part), I’ve been more confident about myself overall, and I’ve gotten a lot more compliments, probably because I seem more happy and secure. It’s been a long journey, and it’s one that I’m still on, but it gets a little easier every day. I may complain about it all the time, but the truth is, I love my hair.