The day I cut my hair, there were no tears—only resolve. It wasn’t a moment of impulsivity. It was a ceremony. A shedding. A quiet rebellion. I sat in my hairdresser’s chair.
“Are you sure?” Myrtho said.
“Yes.”
She tied a towel around my shoulders like a cape. A superhero in transition.
She picked up the shears and faced my reflection. What stared back was a woman whose world had cracked open like the capital of Haiti after the recent quake.
My parents were no longer missing in Haiti. I had worried they’d been swallowed by rubble.
During that mental torture, something primal in me stirred. I had to reclaim something. And so, I turned my attention to the one part of me I had never truly owned: my hair.
For over two decades, I had submitted to the “creamy crack”—the relaxers that stung my scalp, the stylists who tamed my kinky coils into submission. I’d convinced myself it was maintenance. Professionalism. Polished. But what it really was… was erasure.
Each snip sent hair falling first on my cape, then sliding onto the pearly floor tiles. With every chemically-straightened strand that met the floor, I heard the thud of a bar that fell from my follicle prison.
When Myrtho set down the sheer, I ran my fingers through the short, coarse coils that remained. It was soft. Strong. Stubborn.
Like me.
I didn’t look like the polished version of myself that graced dating app profiles. I looked like someone fiercely natural, unapologetically myself. Rachel, remixed. Reborn. And regal.
Cutting my hair wasn’t just about reclaiming my time—six hours a month I used to give to salons could now be mine. It was about redirecting my beauty budget into more enriching endeavours. It was about rejecting the lie that my natural self needed to be fixed.
I left the salon not as a Black girl trying to fit in, but as a Black woman charting her own path.
Free at a last!