Slowly Learning to Love My Hair
/Septembre Anderson has the type of hair that is most feared: Black hair. Her hair is a revolutionary that refuses to be colonized.
Read MoreSeptembre Anderson has the type of hair that is most feared: Black hair. Her hair is a revolutionary that refuses to be colonized.
Read MoreBhairavi Thanki thought being hairy was awful, until she found out it was lucky. “My parents once told me that they were fortunate to have a hairy daughter. It brings good luck they said. Excuse me, what?! I thought they were trying to make me feel better after one particularly gruesome waxing session.”
Read MoreScaachi Koul worries that her arm hair makes her unfeminine. “Leg hair removal felt unavoidable, and socially required, but I figured arm hair was okay to take to the mall. I was wrong. ‘Why do you have that?’ a male classmate asked, pointing to my arms. ‘You’re hairier than I am.'”
Read MoreCaroline Shaheed is no longer going to try and “tame” her Egyptian tresses.
Read MoreJef Catapang’s hair isn’t just thick, it’s thick enough to pierce skin. “Tools high school homies needed for cutting my hair: tweezers, baby powder, and poor rock-paper-scissors skills.”
Read MoreNavi Lamba had her first haircut at age 15, only to learn that she didn’t have white girl hair. “I didn’t have the Princess Diaries moment I had hoped for and was left with something a bit shorter and much puffier, with the odd curl protruding from of my head.”
Read MoreKelli Korducki longed to be blonde so that she could star in her own telenovela. “Blondeness wasn’t exactly required. It was more like the silver bullet that could make even the most marginally negotiable amount of onscreen charisma sufficient for stardom.”
Read MoreCanice Leung has got pin-straight hair, the kind Chinese girls are born with, and the kind they pay lots of money to get. “It always seemed to me a bit like Hudson’s Bay traders selling beaver pelts back to the natives.”
Read MoreLet’s talk about curls. Renée Sylvestre-Williams has found the hairdresser of her dreams.
Read MoreDenise Balkissoon tries not to laugh as her hilarious Brazilian esthetician Perla Porto waxes on about Canadian shyness while waxing off her errant eyebrow hairs.
Read MoreJaime Woo is a Chinese guy, yet he can grow a beard. Weird. “In gay culture, men have decided to flee from the swishy, polished look of the late-90s and early naughts towards beards and tatts. I’m lucky, I guess, that my laziness happened to time in with the trend towards a more traditionally masculine look.”
Read MoreNavneet Alang has learned to love his totally awesome chest hair: “In the time I was busy developing complexes about how I was an impossibly unattractive yeti, Bollywood had hopped on the “ripped, hairless chests” bandwagon.”
Read MoreThe Wellness Issue
I wish I could share a different story of my reproductive life, one filled with love and ancient wisdom. But like the stories of many Indigenous women, mine reflects Canada’s ongoing legacy of colonization.
Our identities, no matter how malleable or elastic, are rooted in geographical locations. How do you get well when your wellness is connected to home, and home is thousands of miles away?
As an Indian yoga teacher in white spaces, I occupy a strange position: trying to honour the yogic tradition that I grew up with and simultaneously feeling unwelcome in the space.
Saving money for school, managing competing schedules and spending hours on public transit put immense pressure on me, and left no time to prioritize my health.
Chinese food and certain aspects of Eastern medicine have entered the mainstream, but traditional Chinese medicine is often regarded with suspicion and sometimes labelled as pseudoscience.
For centuries, community-focused care and ancestral healing knowledge have existed as practices of resistance and freedom for folks of colour.