Never Limit Yourself To Other People’s Expectations

Hello all!

I am Alanna, and I would first off like to say how honored I am to be featured on this blog! Before I jump into the juicy stuff, I’ll tell you a little about me & my hair journey. I am bi-racial—a mixture of black and white, but I am very pale hahaha, and I have always had my curls. Growing up, I went to a school full of people who didn’t look like me and didn’t have my hair type. So, of course this started a vicious cycle of being very ashamed of my hair and putting it into buns. 

As my self-esteem lowered, my motivation to take care of my hair quickly followed, and this led my hair to often become so tangled that it would lock up. This lasted for a few years until I met my group of friends, and if you haven’t seen them plastered on my Instagram story (lol) they all have beautiful hair that is a mixture of different hair types. 

 I vividly remember a conversation I had with one of them; we started talking about hairstyles and she said to me, “Alanna if I had your hair I would do a whole bunch of hairstyles, your hair is so pretty.” And for some odd reason, something was ignited in me, and I was like ‘dang maybe my hair isn’t that bad.’ I was reading in the bible one day and I came across 1 Corinthians 11:15 that said, “But if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering.” This scripture to me meant that the hair on my head is my glory, it is my covering from God. 

He has placed every single hair on my head, and he gave me my curl pattern.  One of the biggest things I’ve had to learn was that it's okay to even have bad hair days. About 50% of the time my hair will be frizzy, and that is perfectly okay. Social media & society has made people feel like it's not okay to not look our best at all times of days. Or if you're not a certain size, hair texture, or have certain charismatics, then that’s a bad thing. God has shaped us to be exactly who we are meant to be, we are not meant to look the same. Think about how boring the world would be if we were the same. Instead, God has given us the chance to express ourselves. 

Therefore, never limit yourself to someone else's expectations when God has told us who we are. Our hair is our glory, something God curated for each of us; he knows every hair on our head. It is a gift from God himself so we need to treat it as it is. Just because I am the one writing this does not mean I am immune to it, it is a daily struggle, but it is also a daily victory because God reminds me every day how amazing my hair is. In addition to God's reassurance, my family, my friends, the people I surround myself with are a big part of it all. I used to surround myself with negative people that would only criticize me and feed into the negativity I was spewing out. Now, I have an amazing group of people that constantly encourage me and if I say something negative about myself, they immediately correct me. At the end of the day, don’t worry about people’s opinions about you. God never told you to impress people, only to love them.