By Virginia Rufina Marquez-Pacheco – Contributor 

For a long time, I would cringe whenever I heard the term “self-love.” I did not understand what it meant. Understanding self-love was all the more difficult for me because I continued to have a difficult relationship with myself, exacerbated by my struggles with mental health. At my best, I tolerated myself. Recently, however, I have come to understand what different people meant when they had told me that I needed to love myself. This was achieved through my hair journey. 

Ironically, this revelation has come in the midst of another mental health crisis. Strangely, being stuck on the island of mental illness has made me realize a deeply buried secret. 

My understanding of self-love came to me some weeks ago as I sat on the hairdresser’s chair, waiting for my curls to dry from a wash-and-go routine. As I looked in the mirror in front of me, I noted how much healthier my hair looked. It was longer, more defined, and it seemed to shine in the same way that a smile lights up a person’s face. It dawned on me then that for the first time in my life, I was proud of my Black hair. 

I had always had a difficult relationship with my hair. In elementary school and high school, I had always been ashamed of my hair – it wasn’t straight or wavy like everyone else’s. So, I always kept it tied in a bun, or later on, I would try to chemically straighten it. By the time I was in CÉGEP and in early university, I had given up entirely and resorted to buzzing it. 

Over time, however, I realized why I disliked my hair. First, our society teaches us to regard Black hair as ugly, unprofessional and overall, inferior to other peoples’ hairstyles. Growing up in an overwhelmingly white neighbourhood, I internalized that devaluation of Black hair, of my hair. It took quite a bit of time and effort for me to find a community that was supportive and allowed me to unlearn these internalized biases. Second, I discovered that I felt overwhelmed by my hair because no one had ever taught me how to properly take care of it. This was another learning journey that I am still on today. I have my sister to thank for inspiring me and teaching me how to learn to better care for my hair and its own unique needs. 

Today, I find myself showing my natural hair with pride. It doesn’t always look nice, and I definitely haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, but it’s my hair. It’s my ancestors’ hair. I am proud of it. 

Why am I writing about my personal hair journey? My hair journey revealed to me that the process of unlearning internalized biases that I carried against myself and the journey of learning 

how to take care of a part of myself were acts of self-love.

This whole time, I had understood self-love to be a state, a noun that is unchanging. I realize now that I was wrong. As bell hooks writes, “for if love is a verb then self-love must also be a verb.” Self-love is an ongoing and never-ending process of unlearning the labels that society imposes on you, of rediscovering yourself and of learning how to take care of yourself. 

To practice self-love is also exhausting, especially in a world that takes so much from us. For me, the key was to practice patience and self-compassion – admittedly not always successfully – through my hair journey. While acknowledging that it is not always easy, I encourage you to find one aspect of yourself to learn to care for, and hopefully, you will begin your own self-love praxis.