Arielle Loren

As many of you have figured out within the last few weeks, I cut my hair. Chopped, gone, and perhaps now in some garbage incinerator floating up to the sky. I have cut my hair before, around my 18^th birthday (that’s about two years ago, yes I am young!), I told my hairdresser that I was tired of my shoulder brushing mane and to cut me the edgyist style she could think of. And I rocked it, HARD, in fact the majority of my friends in New York remembered me with my short hair cut, so when I came back to New York this summer after a year of being abroad with my hair back to my shoulders, a lot of my friends were like “huh? Arielle?”

(left: spring 2008 before I left NYU, right: summer 2009 when I returned to NYC)

There was only one difference though between my previous cut and my current one, the sodium hydroxide also known as a relaxer that kept my hair pin straight (until that new growth kicked in!). After cutting your hair once, the idea of not having hair is not scary. So when I started toying with the idea of cutting my hair again and going natural, being considered “bald-headed” was not a concern. I was scared of the idea that for 11 years, I had not felt the real texture of my hair and I literally had no idea what it would look like. For months, I would allow my hair to grow out (I think I made it to 5 months without a relaxer once!), and pull my mixed relaxed hair and natural hair back into a ponytail and stare in the mirror trying to figure out how it would look if my new growth was all that was there.

And then came the question of my profession, in truth, I’m going to be a writer and now I’m dabbling in film, so having natural hair in the arts shouldn’t cause a huge issue, but what if I changed my mind and wanted to go back to the office setting? As free-thinking as I try to be, the world as it is and as it should be are two different things, simply black women with natural hair or afros are looked at as being either radical, unkept, or both by the majority of America. I went to see Good Hair and Chris Rock did a fabulous job on illustrating the relationships that black women have with their hair. I was so proud to have cut my hair and taken the natural step weeks before and let this be a written testimony that I will never put another relaxer in my hair.

I feel healthier body and spirit wise because I believe my hair was carrying some serious negative energy and pieces of me that I had outgrown long ago. Shout out to Chrissi J. from Pikanini’s Natural Hair Spa in Brooklyn, NY on Franklin and Fulton St for making my “go-natural” experience beautiful and memorable.

My next steps are to graduate, continue writing, and produce my documentary (more details to come). But “in the mean time,” as a new member of the indie film community, I would like to share something very special with y’all and hope you’ll show some love in return.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1phEclFokM]

Shout out to the writer and director of Underbelly, Donald A.C. Conley. You can purchase the full film at http://indieflix.com