The Big Chop

On April 24th, 2018, I cut my hair. I’d like to say I did it solely because I just felt like it but that wouldn’t be the case. I did it because I had to. Yes, I had been wanting to cut my hair in that style for years but never got around to it.

I have endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, both linked to hormonal imbalances. When my hormones just wouldn’t get it together the effects were very visible on my hair.

I had already been slowly trimming my hair every month shorter and shorter to ease into a chop but when my bald patch drastically started to worsen and widen I had to let go.

The haircut was actually pretty bad mostly because I was still trying to retain as much hair as I could and prevented the barber from cutting low enough to do it properly. But I’m not going to lie, I loved my crazy haircut because of the journey it took to get me there.

I even did a photo shoot to capture the moment, the new me. But a few days later when I went to Vancouver I found that they had several barbershops who specialized in my hair texture so I picked a highly rated one nearby and went in for a shorter stylized corrective cut.

Within just a few weeks of cutting my hair, the bald patch was fully filled in. The growth rate was crazy!

When I asked my brother to take this picture, he thought I was just being very weird, didn’t understand that barely three weeks prior I had a huge skin showing hair breaking bald patch.

I love my natural hair, I’ve had it as is on red carpets, in a music video, in shoots, at elegant weddings, everywhere! It has grown so much, although I know its hard to tell cause of how much it coils/shrink.

I think hair is like the rings of a tree, it holds a lot of information, positive and negative. So when you’ve been through a lot, cutting it all off helps with healing and brings a renewal. It’s just hair, it grows back, and if it doesn’t there’s lots of awesome weaves and wigs to play with.

Have you had any hair loss issues? How have you dealt with it? What’s your take on hair length and how it’s used to define genders, class and sophistication?