Life Lesson by Erika

Life Lesson by Erika - October 2013 Scholarship Essay

Like most babies, I was born with straight, glossy hair, plastered to the sides of my head and as soft as the down feathers of a red robin. I gurgled, and cried, and groped for things with little fingers, and, within three months, I had enough hair to fill two babies’ heads.

I think we were asking for it, really, my parents and I. My family urged them not to cut it; it grew long, and thick, and heavy. It was the color of coffee despite the constant arguments regarding whether or not the actual color was a dark brown or black. By the time I was in elementary school it reached down to the center of my back with long, tendriled fingers. My hair curls with the determination of an Olympic marathoner, of a small child tackling his first jawbreaker. It curls with enough precision and tightness that I can keep ballpoint pens inside each individual lock and shake my head like a caged beast without losing a single one. I have been told that it looks like the red stripes of a thousand candy canes, like the broken and flexible cylinder of a perfect Christmastime ribbon curl. It has been called inhuman, insane, anatomically impossible. While it may very well be the first two, it is most certainly not the latter, and so it came to be that the catchphrase of my entire existence, the mantra of my first seventeen years, has reduced itself to the inelegant combination of six simple words:

Yes, it is naturally like this.

After having their curiosity satiated, people try to touch me. I have become an expert at detecting the earliest signs of a toucher: the twitching fingers, the slow inching closer and closer, the quickly moving irises that dart from my face, to the crown of my head, to the hair that falls past my shoulders in coiled rivers. Sometimes they ask if I mind if they take a gentle pull at one curl. Sometimes they do not. I have had an astronomical number of other people's fingers on my scalp, a number so disturbingly exorbitant that it could probably find me some type of fame if I were to bring it to public attention. People pull down on my curls and coo like grandmothers when they spring back into place, occasionally grazing me in the face in the process. When I was young, I used to yell at my mother, "They won't leave me alone!"

They really do not leave me alone.

Clearly, there are worse things than being told that your hair is fantastic on a daily basis. I could claim that all of the attention puts a lot of pressure on me to maintain the hair, to make sure that it is in shipshape every time I even so much as set one toe outdoors. This would be lying, though, because the honest truth is that my hair is not, and has never been, about how other people perceive it, or me. I am entirely convinced that my outward appearance is a direct reflection of my inward appearance; my hair grows from my head in a way that few people in this world can claim that theirs does, and the thoughts inside that head are thoughts that few people in this world can claim for their own. My hair doesn't make me different; my hair is different because I am different. I love the chaos that tumbles around my shoulders, love that people remember me even if they do not know my name. My hair is busy because my head is busy, digesting this world and its people and its ideas.

There is a reason that so many people run their hands through my hair, and the reason is that I always let them. I want to share with every person that I meet, tell them my stories and listen to theirs, even if that means a few awkward moments of gushing and pulling and questions that I will be able to recite from memory until the day that I die. Connecting with people, connecting my ideas with people despite my outward appearance or their own, to not discriminate, to be different, to be accepting no matter what the circumstance. Some days I am tired, or irritable, or in a rush, but my lips can't help themselves. Always, I find myself saying, go ahead and touch it. Really, don't worry; everyone does and I really don’t mind.