Hair Today... Yup Still Here

So I love my hair… a lot. You may not be able to tell based on how it looks at the moment but believe me my hair feels just the same about me. Just a quick backstory I shouldn’t even be here right now (no pun intended) but seriously, this head of hair is already on borrowed time. My mom has short hair, my dad is bald, and my brother, only a year my senior, has a hairline that the isle of Manhattan would be smitten by. Now I’ve gotten a lot of comparisons to different fictional characters based on my hair. My afro first began during eighth grade when on a whim I decided to get a shape up instead of the usual “low with a part” I would always get. I remember the feeling of going into school the next day with something different and how exciting that was. Coming to school with a fresh cut was always quite the event. Guys were like “woahhh!”, and the girls would snicker. On this turning point day on my hair journey, I showed up on a chilly morning with just a shape up and an oversized faux fur and leather jacket with neither my scalp nor my usual part visible. As soon as I walked into the cafeteria my buddy Winston proclaimed “Ohhh! Darren got the fresh cut with the leather jacket!”. From there the length of my afro, along with the legend of it grew and grew. I would trim it down for eighth-grade graduation, but it would still maintain its length as well as the allure that came with it. I ended that year on a high note being hoisted on my classmates’ shoulders as well as creating my own catchphrase at eighth-grade prom over the shrimp buffet (“hook a brother up!”). Freshman year of high school I became “lemme hold a dolla”; Chris from Everybody Hates Chris. This mini afro I had at the time was everything to me. It provided me warmth in the wintertime, a helmet to keep my naïve fourteen-year-old brain safe, and a nifty place to store things(most notably pens and candy canes). It was a novelty for classmates to see me pick my hair since apparently, they had never seen an afro up close before. This, I imagine, is what a llama must feel like at a petting zoo(minus the treats of course). This small feeling of belonging, however, carried me through a rough freshman year. As things began to look up for me during my sophomore year of high school my hair length started trending shorter. I made the decision to finally get a full haircut for the first time in a few years. Honestly, I felt naked and a bit uncomfortable. This, I imagine, is what it must feel like for pets to get those big cone things from the vet office. Regardless my hair would grow back during this year at which point I would begin pulling out and chewing my hair to kick my nail-biting habit. Call this trauma bonding if you’d like. After a riveting sophomore year of high school, the shine on myself and my ‘fro began to fade going into and during junior year. I needed to do something drastic to try and keep relevant and this, I imagine, is what it must feel like for a former child star to create a podcast. It would be the flat top as my next hair progression. My very first flat top wasn’t great, but it served its purpose of providing something different for me (and for others). It would get so much better between the end of junior year and throughout senior year of high school that a friend of mine made a chart affectionately called “The many faces of Darren” which featured other flat top heroes like Kid from Kid N’ Play, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Booker T, and everyone’s favorite nerd Steve Urkel. Fast forwarding to freshman year of college my revitalized flat top and I were ready to take over. I mean this is what I had been dreaming of throughout the entirety of high school. I would get a few compliments on my flat top in the first few weeks and each time I would retort “Thanks, I like yours too!” which would either be met with a chuckle or a strange look. Either way, I was living my best life and that Halloween in 2013 I would don my vintage cardigan and flip sunglasses to become Dwayne Wayne the smooth-talkin’ math whiz from the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World (if you know, you know). That would be the peak of my flat top powers however and my hair would go through a few different iterations leading to where it is currently. I focus on that specific time period since my hair and my identity were basically intertwined. My hair wasn’t just part of what I was but completely made up who I was. My hair helped me to have an identity while I was still trying to find my own from within and for that, I’ll be forever grateful. It was hair then, it’s hair today, and it’ll be hair tomorrow… presumably.