Skip to main content

Wrong Hair

I read about the Dove CROWN Act the same afternoon as I was squirming while on video because my hair did not sit quite right compared to other that of other women who were on the call. I have long forgotten that my hair was once considered beautiful and I received a lot of compliments for it. That was back in India and ofcourse I was way younger. Adjusted to age, my hair is still nice. I think deep down I understand this to be a fact - it is not such a big surprise, Indian women do have the best hair in the world. So why do I feel so unsettled each time I am on video and something is every so slightly off with my naturally wavy hair that I don't like to use any products on. 

I don't want to change anything about it - don't want my hair to look like someone else's hair. I love what I have but each day it brings me some low level of anxiety around other people who don't have my kind of hair. I have a lot of sympathy for any woman whose hair is viewed as distracting. I see mine as a bit of distracting and unprofessional in comparison with the baseline hair that is common in this country's average workplace setting. I expect that others view it the same way and there is a value judgement attached to it. Each time I use a flat iron on my hair, I feel like a sell-out and also ugly. That flat straight conforming hair is not what God intended for me and it simply does not look right. I need to become an uglier version of myself in order to fit better and that has not stopped hurting with over two decades of practice. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more