I am a curly-haired girl.
Everyone calls my hair scraggly.
Everyone insists that I should straighten it,
But I don’t want to.

My entire family has soft, straight hair.
I’m the only one with curly hair.
“Why is your hair so ugly?” they also wondered.
My mother didn’t know how to take care of it.
Everyone used to compliment my sister’s beautiful hair and pity me.
body image, hair, beauty standards, bullying

I used to be a swimmer.
I am dark-skinned,
Because I used to go to swim practice every morning.
I’m the only person in my family with curly hair.
Not a day would pass without someone commenting on my hair and skin.

I was never loved when I was a kid,
Because of my skin tone.
It was light brown,
But people liked to judge by appearances.
They’d always look at me at school,
As if I were different,
Until I started believing it.

“Why isn’t my hair pretty like yours?
Why isn’t it soft like my friends’ hair at school?
Why do I keep screaming whenever my mom fixes it for me?”
body image, hair, bullying, beauty standards

I don’t want to be the kind of woman they expect me to be.
I don’t want to shave.
The problem is that people see that as a lack of cleanliness.
But I think it’s okay.
I want to be flat.

body image, social pressure

I had thick hair as a child.
I hated how much it hurt when my mother washed, brushed, or braided it.
I could never wear it down like my sister, who had beautiful straight hair.
One time at the beach, when I was 15 years old, a tourist stopped and asked me,
“How do you make your hair curly like that?”
body image, hair, beauty standards, bullying

I have curly hair.
When I was young,
Mama used to straighten it for me every 3 to 4 days.
The heat and the yanking of my hair were too much for me as a child.
Besides, I came to really believe that it was ugly.
body image, bullying, hair

All I remember is that I couldn’t stop crying,
As she kept cutting my hair shorter and shorter.
I used to believe that the essence of beauty lied in having long hair.
The longer your hair gets, the more beautiful you become.

But I remember the way the hairdresser looked at my hair when I took off the hijab in front of her.
She was surprised it was curly.
She would make fun of my hair to the other people in the salon.
I think she used to hurt me on purpose when she was straightening it.
body image, hair, bullying, beauty standards