Although I've lived with you for twenty-one years, I’ve spent most of my life trying to change you. To me, you felt like nothing more than an undesirous, wild beast making a home atop my head. I blamed you for my deep sense of discomfort while watching women who looked like me, but had thinner, straighter versions of you. I felt out of place because not even my mom and sister had hair that looked like you. I watched in envy as they walked about with their desirously wavy, tame tresses with no concern for what others may say or see.

I wanted desperately to rid myself of you. I wanted to be able to sit in a classroom and not have to feel like I was the class pet while my classmates stuck their grimy fingers in you, only to create more insufferable knots. I wanted to look like the other black women I saw on TV who had shiny, straight hair. I didn’t want to have to wake up with dread thinking about what you may look like that day. I didn’t want to have to endure the strain and pulsing in my scalp after you were combed through.

If only then I understood that you couldn’t help how you were any more than I could. If I could’ve only seen then that you were not something to be ashamed of, but just as much a part of everything that is catastrophically wonderful about me. But I didn’t. So instead I relaxed you. I braided you. I pressed you. I damaged you. I neglected you. I hid you. I abused you.

You didn’t deserve that.

It took me leaving home, flying nearly 3,000 miles across the country, and being surrounded by even more people who weren’t like me to finally admit that you couldn’t be blamed for my insecurity. It took seeing hundreds upon thousands of other Afro-Latinas and black women embracing their curls and coils (some with hair just as kinky as you) to question whether I was wrong to be ashamed of you. To question what it really meant to have “pelo malo”.

I didn’t see that my insecurity with you stemmed from the same internalized racism that made me uncomfortable with not only you, my hair, but also the color of my skin. As a child, I couldn’t see that just because others thought my hair was “bad hair” and needed to be changed, didn’t mean that I should feel the same. I was blind to the fact that you are something to take pride in – and that to wear you free was not a burden, but a political statement. A statement that I would no longer allow the gaze of a rigid society impress upon my own concept of true beauty. A statement that I would embrace the very thing that I’ve always been told I must hate about myself. A statement of black love.

Although I still struggle everyday letting you exist in all your magnificence, I appreciate you more and more as I get to know you again. I love how, like me, you are almost infuriatingly unique and stubborn in your ways. I admire that you connect me not only to my Black heritage, but also to my Latinx roots. I love you because you are a part of who I am – and I don’t need to change who I am to love me.

I can only hope that if I ever have a daughter of my own, she’ll be able to look at her mother’s dancing ringlets and feel comfort in knowing she doesn’t need to be ashamed of her own. And I hope that each time I let you free that girls like me will take pride in their own vibrant coils.