Oops… Normal is Overrated

I stood, stunned, thinking I had misunderstood the voice on the other end of the phone. “Normal hair?” I repeated? “Yes, we only do normal hair”, the voice replied. 

I wish I had the tenacity, the wit, or the perhaps the energy to actually continue that conversation, but the quiet rage I had felt for the last hour as I researched and called different salons to see if they took clients with curly hair finally bubbled over and I hung up the phone. 

Island girl

I thought back to where I had been just a week before. Sunkissed, smelling of the beach, curls bouncing in the wind. I’ve always felt like I blended in in the islands more than I ever had anywhere else. 

I come alive in the Carribbean. My skin glows, my hair shines, my eyes gleam, my smile widens. Something is always peeled back, revealing the actual Damaris, the real version unlocked by the sun and the sea. 

My hair came along to Martinique. It freed itself from my ponytail as I looked after my grandparents, damp with sweat from the Carribean heat. It swayed in the wind among the leaves of the mango trees I climbed, smelling of the sweet fruit long after I had descended. It curled and floated around me as I dove underwater, tickling my shoulders. My hair flew in every which direction as I took it to cliffs and mountains and piers and forests and volcanoes, not once caring if it was different.

There’s something freeing about blending in, about disappearing into a crowd. While some people live to be different, crave being the center of attention, and want to stand out, I don’t. For such a long time what I wanted, wasn’t to stand out, but to blend in… to be normal. 

It turns out that my hair doesn’t particularly fit in anywhere. It’s not normal hair to the white people, it’s metisse or mulatto hair to the black. As it seems like there’s no running away from being ‘different’, perhaps it’s better to embrace it. 

Back to Normal… or not I guess

Back in Paris, hair a little shorter, skin a little less tan, I am once again ‘different’. The nice thing, I suppose, about living in a city like Paris is that more often than not, your differences are celebrated. Your unique mosaic blends beautifully into all of the various tiles of the city, a chance to blend while being yourself. A chance to be normal.

But perhaps normal is overrated.

So let your hair down and celebrate the things that make you… you. 

Cheers to the new normal.