All “LOCked” Up: The Process of Patience and a Spiritual Connection

I don’t really have much patience for anything. I don’t like my time and money wasted, I don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen next, and I don’t like to not be in control. Check me out. I feel like most of my life I wanted everything to work out the way I thought it should and that if it didn’t happen right away then it wasn’t going to happen at all. Here’s a few examples of what I’m saying.

1. I wanted a cell phone when I was 14. My parents kept telling me no. I wasn’t being patient and automatically assumed I was never going to get one. Then they show up the July before my freshman year of high school with a silver flat back Nokia phone and I was elated, lol.
2. In grad school, I wasn’t losing weight fast enough, so I gave up because I believed I couldn’t do it. One day, I stopped worrying and finally saw it come off.
3. The job search I went through this summer reallllllly stretched my patience to the very edge of a cliff. I started doubting God and myself and believed I wasn’t going to get a job. I was trying to rush application processes and spoke negativity into the air…basically blocking my blessings because there’s power in the tongue. And what you speak out will manifest itself in your life. Once I started to restore my faith, I stumbled across the best job that I could ask for at this time in my life.

So, as you can see, my patience = lacking. But in June, I decided to hop on a journey that I never thought I would actually do. I decided to lock my hair. Now, I knew growing up and much of my adult life that I liked to change my hair up too much to ever lock it. I also didn’t want to do anything too drastic too my hair because I didn’t want to feel like I was taking away a piece of my femininity. Nonetheless, I stared at my reflection in the mirror for days after I took down my last sew-in. My hair was thick and had grown a lot. I was too overwhelmed with job searching to actually have the patience to “deal” with my natural hair. Any person with natural hair that has really tight coils, understands what I mean when I saw “deal” with it. The detangling, washing/conditioning/or cowashing, oiling, the leave-in conditioner, etc. then styling, then hoping your twist out is dry for the next morning, just to end up putting it in a puff at the end of all the madness. I definitely did not have the time for all that. I chatted with a few of my friends who had locs to get some advice on how to begin. I asked them questions like, “Should I get them professionally done?” “Should I do them myself?” “What gel do I use?” “Should I interlock them or palm roll?” I mean, the questions were endless. I would ask the same questions to different people just to hear multiple perspectives. I opted on doing them myself because I was unemployed and job searching and didn’t want to spend money that wasn’t going towards necessities plus I wanted to challenge myself to start my own. Instead of parting my hair and rolling each loc, I decided to two-strand twist my hair as if I was twisting it for a twistout. It took my about three hours to finally finish. All of my locs were different sizes and my parts were disproportionate but they were mine.

But soon after, I was getting impatient. I wanted December to get here so I could know what my hair was going to look like finally locked. Even after I got a job and moved, my original twists were still very distinctive and I didn’t see any signs of my hair locking. I was frustrated. But a few weeks ago. I was playing with my hair in the mirror like I normally do before I oil my scalp and there it was. I saw my first fully locked loc on the lower right side of my hair. That’s when I knew it was going to be uphill from there.

This is maybe one of the most difficult things to do for someone like me who doesn’t have much patience. It is taking a lot out of me but the possibility of becoming better from this experience is so clear right now. After I saw the first one, started paying my hair more attention. I massaged my scalp and used a different blend of oils. I soon noticed that all of my twists were now in the locking stage. I still have a ways to go before they are fully locked but my progress is showing. I’m even not rushing the growth of them now. I’ve now accepted my hair and recognize its going to do what it wants.

Lastly, this experience has bonded me to my hair. I know that may sound crazy but I’ve built a sort of spiritual connection with my girls (my locs). All 99 of them (one of my besties counted them for me one day). My girls just be doing their own things.

I do still wear my wigs. And people keep asking me, “why don’t you just wear your locs all the time?” or they would say, “embrace them at every stage, this is part of the journey”. At first, I was wearing my wigs because I wasn’t embracing them fully. Now, I wear them because I want to and I actually really like weave. When I’m ready to stop, I will. But probably not.

Practice Patience.

❤ Queen T