Brooke Cullinane

With lake water and time by the pool, I hope I can grow to love my natural hair, despite how messy it seems.

This summer will be my favorite season of my life: I am utterly sure of it. It will be the most idealistic set of months that will surpass even my first real Michigan autumn. After all, I will drive for the first time without the familiar accompaniment of my mom in the front seat, I will receive my first paycheck from my first real job, and I will spend countless hours in the water and on the pickleball court. I will add the UV scale back on my home screen and inevitably obsess over the gradual development of my tan lines as I insistently pester my friends over when the next pool party can be. 

Now, this is not an unfounded, naive hope: I know I will spend time scrolling on my phone with boredom rooting itself in my thoughts, and this summer will not be entirely blissful. But I am—without a doubt—sure that I will mourn the last moments spent outside before school. What more could I ask for this summer than friendships, sun, and “firsts”?

No matter how much I may anticipate this upcoming summer, I know one consistent outcome will follow me. With Lake Michigan and the dives into my pool, my hair will spring back to a frizzy jumble of curls and waves and somehow totally straight sections. This summer will bring a persistent return to my messy, jumbled natural hair, a representation of the death of the smooth strands that have fanned around my shoulders in the fall and winter.

I never knew how to deal with my hair. When I was little, it was a side-parted, often pony-tailed, mess that my parents weren’t sure what to do with, and I proudly proclaimed that my hair was a unique trait that no one in my family shared. But when I first discovered the potential of a straightener, I turned the dial to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and never set it down again. Despite a consistent lack of heat protectant—I was, after all, in middle school—and a lack of any resemblance to a hair care routine, my hair had never felt better. Although pictures will beg to differ, I felt chic with straight strands of hair that barely resembled the curly mess it once had been.

It shouldn’t have surprised me so much when my teammate asked me this week, “Wait, your natural hair isn’t straight?”

More than halfway through the season, and I hadn’t worn my hair natural once. I would want to attribute this to the efficient—and innately lazy—routine of straightening my hair or adding a few curls with a wide curling iron, but I know that lie resides under a burning dislike for the natural disorder of my hair. I can’t avoid it in the summer, though—not if I wish for weeks spent by the lake with my feet covered in sand and eyes stinging from the waves. I hope my love for the summer would outweigh a silly discomfort with messiness.

I’ve claimed, over and over, that it just “doesn’t suit me.” It looks gorgeous on that classmate, or that cousin, or that actress, but never on me. My friends—hollowly—tell me that they love the volume and pattern, but I don’t want obligatory compliments or reassurance. I’m not a messy person. I’m not a jumble. I’m not naturally effortless. I am precise, exact, and measured. The times that I appreciate my unique waves are when I wake up early once a month to evenly distribute curl cream, when it is manufactured.

The water doesn’t bring out a defined, cute curl pattern, but only highlights the heat damage and suffocation I subjected my hair to in the name of presentability. 

I know how trivial this sounds, how cliché, how completely irrelevant this silly dislike really is, and I truly wish I could instead write that I love my natural hair, that I’m excited for the waves to curl it, and that I will dunk my head in the pool over and over. I hope by next school year I can agree with that, because I love summer, and I wish to grow to love my natural hair.