A year ago: pondering patience

A year ago I was asking myself the question, "Why do I want dreadlocks?"  I rambled a bit, but my answer came down to one word:  patience.

 Where it starts will be with a desire to learn more patience, which is one of the reasons I admire trees and other plants as much as I do.  Trees can only adapt to the world by using one tool:  slow, methodical growth.  In comparison, blooming flowers and ripening vegetables in the garden seem swift, but gardens themselves are best improved year over year in the long haul.

One year later, I haven't made so much headway on the whole patience thing.  I got tired of using wax, tired of not using wax, and then decided to do both.

Rubber bands

I've been careful to only use rubber bands on my nurture side, but I figured it was one of the more extreme things I'm doing.  I mean, what harm could a rubber band do?

When my friend Tim was thinking about locks, I offered him some of my excess bands for sectioning off the hair.  He agreed that having locks of roughly even thickness was what he wanted.  (We also spoke about wax, and I'll be coming back to that in a post soon.  There are more reasons people choose to use wax than some people recognize.)

So I was surprised when Tim told me he was not using bands, because he'd heard that they "cause clumping."  My immediate reaction was to ask, "Isn't that the point?"

I think what Tim had heard is that bands can cause thin spots and break hairs.  If they're too tight, yup, they can.  It's his choice, but I still think that rubber bands are not likely to be harmful, and the fact that I won't use them on the nature side is mostly me being extra cautious, in case I'm wrong.

A year ago: is my hair long enough?

My hair was free to roam.

A year ago today, I was fretting over my hair.  I'd made up my mind that I was going to lock it, but I wasn't sure if it was long enough yet.  My patience being what it is, I didn't want to wait.  I rationalized moving fast:

The main advantage of locking the hair when it's shorter is that it will take less time for my dreadful friends to help me.  The backcombing process can take six hours for 18 inches of hair, and is painful and tiring.

One year later, I know I wrote those words, but oh, I did not understand the meaning of "painful and tiring" when I posted that passage.  Nope, not by a long shot.

I daresay the locks have grown some.

My worries were for naught -- my locks have endured, despite the short hair we started with, and the controversial waxing, crocheting, and all the other hoo-hah that's been going into my nature-vs-nurture test.

And my hair has grown longer, too, but what I not sure 100% sure of is how much more they've locked in the past 50 weeks.  Living with them day after day makes it harder to notice change, and I'm not really sure how to measure it.

My friend Amanda Catherine, who hadn't seen me in a couple of months, just told me that my locks are lookin' fine, so that was a nice boost.  (I'll have her reason for dreadlocks posted here as soon as I can get her to hold still long enough to tell me about it.)

One thing I'm positive about is that I hate the length of my hair this April.  To much volume for a hat, not enough length to tie it back.  Of course, the milestone that everyone with locked hair looks forward to is being able to use a lock to tie back the rest of the hair.  At the base of my neck, my longest locks are about three inches, so that's going to be awhile.  Some people have told me that it's easier to shave the back of the neck than to get that hair to lock, but it's steady as she goes.

Reason #19: always wanted them

Tim is another one who has wanted to lock his hair for awhile.

A year ago: blogging begins

A year and two days ago I launched this blog with my first, tentative reasons for dreadlocks.

I know that there's a good amount of negative stereotyping and perceptions about dreadlocks, mostly because I've shared a lot of those perceptions myself.  People who wear dreadlocks are dirty, aimless people who can't get a job, right?

All the hat I ever needed

Even though I was considering them, I really didn't like looking at locked hair.  I would glance the way people do at naked bodies in a public locker room:  curious, but not wanting to stare.  The staring would have been in part from fascination, but at least a little from revulsion.  Even though I had been thinking about them for quite awhile, my emotional reaction that they must be dirty was still mixing it up with the new, more rational understanding that washing locks is not only possible, but a really good idea.  I definitely had a knee-jerk reaction against locks, so much so that my second post, the following day, chronicled how I wanted to hide my dreadlocks once I had them.

When I can't be bothered, it looks like this.

One year later, I look at dreadlocks.  I talk to people about them, asking their reasons for dreadlocks (and please, do send in your reason if you've got one).  It's a conversation starter, and it doesn't feel awkward to me anymore.

One year later, my hat can still fit all of my hair, but not without it looking like I have a beastly occipital bone tumor. While pulling it back right now makes me look like a mangy chicken, a ponytail holder working with my hat pulls off something of a round head profile.

This post is the beginning of a new, regular feature for this blog, called one year later.  In each post, instead of simply talking about myself, I will talk about how I was talking about myself a year ago, and then talk about how differently I talk about myself now than I did then.  I hope that this feature will allow me to create new, self-absorbed content with a minimum of effort, while avoiding a metaphysical feedback loop which could eliminate all traces of me from the space-time continuum.

Luckily for you, my reader, if I fail you will never have read any of this in the first place.

Reason # 18: Low maintenance

YouTuber rockemknotty responds to my question,"What's your reason for dreadlocks?"



Submit your reason for dreadlocks to be featured here!

Reason #17: no other choice

AnnMarie doesn't have dreadlocks anymore, but if you want to check 'em out, they're the ones that I used to create the header image for this blog.

They were this big!

"I didn't really have a choice," she told me.  Her reason for dreadlocks is that somebody started giving them to her and she just decided to go with it.

"The first one was really, really big," AnnMarie recalled.  In the picture here she's demonstrating where a helpful person with busy fingers got the process started, and with how much hair.  It was a big enough chunk that she thought it would be easier to let 'em lock than to try to take it out, which she figured would involve lots of hair loss.

It was at a Rainbow Gathering that she went ahead with it.  "I decided to try to do one lock a day," she said, but "there was a lot of hair," so she and her friends had a lot more work to do than could have been finished on that schedule.

Five years later AnnMarie lost her locks, and this past summer she loaned those locks to me for my blog.  Check out her first attempt at making them into a hat in this dreadlocks vlog -- she's since successfully turned them into a cool knit hat!