Dependency and Ignorance were the Major Causes of My First Transitioning Failure.

In 2006, my hair was breaking and was thin so I decided to chop it and regrow it through braids. Where I was living there were not many hairdressers who knew how to braid afro hair but I found one who was really good at doing cornrows. She could do any cornrows style you could ever think of and did such a great job that everywhere I went people wanted to know who did my hair.

Then I moved to another country where again I had no stylists who did natural hair or transitioning hair. My response was just to get a relaxer and quit my transition.

When I thought about those times I realized that my transitioning attempts had failed for 2 very important reasons:

Dependency

I was so dependent on the hairdresser to braid my hair and made no attempt at learning anything about my hair. Without a hairdresser, the only thing I knew how to do was to relax my hair.

So when I moved to another country and I couldn’t find a natural stylist it was only natural that I did only what I knew.

No patience

With the lack of knowledge came absolutely no patience with regards to caring for natural hair. I didn’t even know that what I was doing was called transitioning.

All I knew was that I liked the volume which my natural hair had but I did not know how to style it or care for it in the state it was in.

I transitioned again in 2013 and it was a success because I had to learn to be independent and was more informed on how to care for my natural hair. The moral of the story is if you failed at anything in your hair journey you can probably look back and see what you could have done differently. You would be surprised at what you find out about yourself.