By Angela Crumdy

On November 17th, 2018 my locs turn three years old. Yes, I plan on throwing a party or at least getting my hair done. It’s been a journey worth celebrating. Until this point, my relationship with my hair has ranged any where from indifferent to antagonistic. Growing up, I was teased for having ‘Oprah Winfrey’ hair. Hairstylists often described my mane as thick, coarse and one even likened doing my hair to “performing surgery.” I started getting relaxers in high school, but I was never really happy with that either—it was convenient, but my hair was always limp and lifeless. I went completely natural my junior year of college after spending three months in Cuba for a study abroad program. I was liberated from the ‘creamy crack’, but being a loose natural had it’s own set of challenges. For four years, I struggled to find the right products, tools and styles to suit my 4c hair. I poured over Curly Nikki blog forums and various YouTube channels like Napptural85 hoping that something would be the magic fix. I spent most of that time being frustrated with my hair and myself, and yet, I persisted.

When I began graduate school, there was very little time for me to fight my hair, balance a full course load, adjust to life in a new city, and, given my ever present imposter syndrome, try to figure out if I’d made the right decision to pursue a PhD in the first place. My hair looked just as frazzled as my brain, and it was not cute. As the only woman of color in my cohort, I was hyper-aware of my appearance and what my presence signified in the predominantly white space. Early on, I had the all too common experience of a white woman putting her hands in my hair “because she does it with all of her friends.” This, coupled with the fact that my nearly four year relationship was coming to an end, is what finally got me to start my loc journey. What else did I have to lose?

There was a running joke with a few friends of mine that we would loc our hair once we got tenure, but the graduate school experience was already taking so much out of me that I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it to that point or if I even wanted to. I felt numb, and I realized that, life was too short to put off something I truly desired for an uncertain future. Maybe in all that was ending for me, I needed something to remind me that new beginnings were possible. I needed something positive to look forward to. So, after doing a Yelp search, I walked into a salon in my Brooklyn neighborhood, and made an appointment. I distinctly remember the loctician telling me that my locs were going to look like worms, but at that point, things really couldn’t get any worse.

As I approach this three-year milestone, I really think of it as a testament to how far I’ve come professionally and personally. There were times when I didn’t know what my baby locs would evolve into as they grew much in the same way that I didn’t’ know what would be in store for me as I developed my research project. As my locs matured so did I, and now, I am about to embark on fully funded dissertation fieldwork on a project that I found extremely rewarding. I’m finally settling in to myself as a scholar, and this is the first time in my life that I can honestly say that I love my hair. I finally don’t feel like I’m fighting myself, which is important when I am constantly confronted with external forces that would prefer I pursue the life of the mind and leave my body behind. My hair is now an adequate expression of how I’ve come to understand myself as person, and I am extremely grateful for the journey—ugly phase and all. Cheers to three years and not waiting for tenure to begin taking steps to become the person I’ve always wanted to be.

Angela Crumdy was raised in Charlotte, North Carolina and is currently a fifth-year doctoral student in anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She holds a B.A. in anthropology and Latin American & Caribbean Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  Her current dissertation research examines the experiences of Cuban women educators historically and during the country’s contemporary teacher shortage. In her free time, she enjoys salsa dancing, volunteering and blogging on her health and wellness site academicmuscle.com.