Rishire Writes

There are very few days a month that I dread, but one of those days is wash day. If you have moderately long, kinky/curly hair, you know what I’m talking about. Between the de-tangling, the five rounds of conditioning, and the hours of styling, wash day is more like wash DAYS. Ain’t nobody got time for that, but unfortunately, I have to make time for that. If I don’t do all the conditioning and combing and curling, I look a mess, and I can’t afford to look a mess, especially when shooting auditions. I have to look my very best for the five minute, phone sized video that determines whether or not I have a chance at booking a role.

For those five minutes, I spend hours on hours doing my hair, putting on makeup, choosing an outfit, and learning my lines. It’s work that so often does not see results but is absolutely necessary in the pursuit of my dreams. It’s work that, as a black woman, I have to go the extra mile for. As Britni Danielle wrote in The Guardian, “We have to work twice as hard to get half as far as our white counterparts.” In such a superficial industry as entertainment, the time I spend on my hair is the requisite double work that honestly keeps me tired. Even when my hair is done, I’m thinking of the next style and how to schedule my work, shoots, and social gatherings around wash day.

I love protective styles like box braids and marley twists, but they can be so time consuming to do and so expensive to get done that they’re not always options. During the pandemic when so many things were shut down, I learned how to do a lot of those styles myself, and it felt good to take back some of that control, but at the same time it begs the question, if you can do it yourself, why pay someone else to do it? Is the convenience worth it? Before I quit my job, it sure was, but now that every penny needs to be pinched within an inch of its life, it might not be. Let’s be real, it also very well might be. The last time I did a protective style on myself, it took me a whole ten hours. TEN HOURS! I’m tired just remembering it.

The sad part is, I don’t know where society’s views of my natural hair end and where mine begin. Growing up in the south, I used to put chemicals in my hair to make it straight. I envied the girls in my class whose hair would air dry straight or slightly wavy. When I would go to a pool, “Don’t let Rishire’s hair get wet” was a common refrain. I felt like my peers thought I was dirty because I used a shower cap and didn’t wash my hair every day like they did. I didn’t see myself reflected on TV or in the world I was living in. I hated being so aggressively different from everyone, and my hair was the worst part of it. I shunned typically black hairstyles like braids and twists and didn’t even know that there were wigs that looked so real and could have protected my natural tresses.

After moving to New York and seeing more people that looked like me who embraced their looks in a way I had never seen before, I became emboldened and chopped off all of my hair, wanting to start fresh. Eight years after my big chop, I’m still struggling to embrace my natural coils. I don’t know how to braid or do much with my hair, but what I do know how to do, I do it with mediocrity. It’s not too bad, but boy is it exhausting, and I really wish I didn’t have to try so hard. We’re all raised in a system that was created by and for certain people, and as much change has been made, the system still exists and worst of all, it exists within us marginalized people. My perspective is skewed by this system, and I can’t seem to stop myself from wanting to conform to it, from wanting to look a certain way to be accepted by it, from wanting to only put forth an image that is already seen in it.

A few months ago, I was watching one of my self tape auditions with a former professor, and I couldn’t help but grimace. It was one of those auditions that didn’t align with wash day as so many do given the short notice and quick turnaround, so my hair was this big, old mess, pinned back in a way that I thought would make it sort of kinda cute at the time, but watching it back, it just looked crazy. I said that to the professor, but he shrugged it off, saying that the hair is what got me the audition. He said that my unique look is what gets me noticed, but I still couldn’t help but wish I had tried harder to get my hair under control. I guess it’s true what they say – we are our worst critics.