Sunday, March 27, 2011

Not enough time to talk. Long hair, neglect dreadlocks, beards, hearing voices, how I decided to grow long hair and locks.

10:21 AM 3/27/11

I haven't written anything new on the longnaturalhair blog in a few weeks (grr, some squatter stole longhair.wordpress.com, and is just wasting it and doing nothing). My goal there is to write a smaller number of high-quality articles. It won't be the 'I had a crappy day' kind of blog, like this one here. It's not as much of a personal blog, although there might be personal stories or incidents or experiences that I've had which relate to long hair. That will be necessary. But it's not as much of a gripe-and-complain sort of blog. Eventually the spirit of the blog will develop over time and I'll find out what it's going to be like.

I've been going over to the dreadlockssite forums, usually on the mobile website (www.dreadlockssite.com/m/main/) because my Windows 98 running an old version of Opera isn't able to interact with the normal site very well. I really, really need to do the computer cleanup because I can't even use Firefox anymore. There's an unexplained technical problem and Firefox won't let me uninstall it or reinstall it, and it won't even open or run. I'll be doing another data backup and hard drive format and will reinstall all of Windows from scratch.

Anyway, I've been doing a little bit of research over on the dreadlockssite forum about why men don't grow beards. I am a major beard advocate, but I need to understand why men don't want to get them. I believe the solution to all of this is to start a business where you are required to follow the grooming rules as a condition of your job. You must be required to grow long hair while being employed at that company. It can't be 'optional' because nobody ever bothers taking that option. It already IS optional, and 'optional' just doesn't work. 'Optional' has failed miserably, and as a result, we live in a world full of totally shaved heads and bodies and eyebrows and nothing to touch and nothing to look at, and not only that, but Western culture has spread and spread and spread to the countries where beards used to be more common, and they're seeing the mainstream media from the USA, where all the men have shaved faces.

Some people answered my question about why they don't grow beards. I had asked the question, if you are a man growing your hair long, then why don't you grow your beard long?

I'm going to answer this question myself from my own experience. I obviously can't grow a beard (I have maybe five or six whiskers under my chin, and five or six whiskers on the 'soul patch' under my lower lip, and nothing at all on my cheeks). However, there are lots of things that it just didn't occur to me to do, until 'they,' 'the voices,' urged me to do it. I actually had an external person telling me to do something which I didn't think of on my own. 'I did it because the voices told me to' really is the reason why I grew extreme neglect dreadlocks, or ascetic dreadlocks, by quitting shampoo. It didn't occur to me on my own.

There are a few things they told me to do.

1. Years ago, by myself, I did something very similar to what RDL's wife did. In one of her blogs, she talks about how she cut off the damaged hair which she had been dyeing for several years, and she felt great afterwards and loved the soft smoothness of her hair. I also did that in high school after perming, spraying, gelling, moussing, and blow drying for several years. I chopped it all out and had a chin length bob. Then I let it grow down, but I was still keeping it short, not on purpose, but because I couldn't resist the occasional impulse to chop off several inches of hair for no reason, spontaneously.

After I moved to State College, PA, in 1997, 'they' started telling me that I ought to be fully committed to growing all of my hair as long as it could grow, to terminal length. That fits with the overall theme of not shaving any of my body hair. It's like Ayn Rand said about Howard Roark's buildings - a unified principle that applies to the whole building, a consistent, non-contradictory theme. I liked that idea. So the idea of cutting off no hair at all, ever, is related to the 'non-contradictory principle' idea. That came from 'them.' It wasn't my own idea. But I liked the idea and I agreed with it.

2. Then, a couple years ago, 'they' suggested that I stop trying to trim split ends. I was aware of split ends and was disturbed by them. However, my split ends weren't very bad anymore. I had switched to using only a wide-toothed comb, and not a brush. The brush made the split ends worse. If you only gently comb your tangles out with a wide tooth comb, then you aren't damaging the hair as badly. Also, there were these parasitic mites which are associated with cats and dogs, and we had them very badly when I was at my ex-boyfriend's house and we had the stray cats. I think they are a type of mange or scabies. They seemed to get into my hair brushes. That was probably the main reason I stopped using the hair brushes. Using a comb, I didn't get the mites itching my hair as much anymore. (The mites used to be a VERY BIG DEAL and a HUGE NUISANCE that I was very upset about, but that's a whole other long story. I don't have a problem with them anymore. Long story... another day...)

So there was a time when I wasn't creating very many new split ends. I was doing very little damage by using only a wide toothed comb. Brushes are a big cause of split ends. I would always notice that the ends looked more damaged if I did, occasionally, use a brush.

But I was researching about how to grow long hair while also trimming split ends. On the websites, I discovered that people use a twist and trim method. You twist the strand of hair until the ends stick out of the twisted strand, and then you gently trim only the ends that are sticking out.

This was obsessive and time consuming, but I did it. I felt like it didn't do much good and felt like I wasn't getting ALL of the ends that way. But for a year or two or three, I was trying to twist and trim the ends while continuing to grow my hair long.

If you just cut a half inch off the ends of your hair, to trim the ends, then eventually you are cutting off too much length, especially as your hair gets very long. This is hard to explain. I'm accustomed to not needing to explain this anymore, because it's so far back in the past that I'm not even worried about it at all. But if someone was new to all this, they would need to know. So I will try to remember the explanation.

The usual way to trim split ends is to cut about a half inch, or an inch, off the ends.

However, do you cut straight across the line of hair? Do you cut the bottom of the hair in a curved shape? What about the split ends that are JUST ABOVE the line of hair you've just cut? And if you look farther and farther up, if you look very closely, you will see lots of split ends (this requires 20/20 vision! or a magnifying glass!). If you became obsessive and perfectionistic, then you would have to chop all of your hair all the way to the scalp to make sure that you removed every split end on your entire head, because I'm sure you could find one buried here and there and anywhere.

Then there is the phenomenon of 'tapering.' Tapering is disturbing to the people who are accustomed to the idea that 'hair must be cut in a straight line.' Tapering to a point is what naturally happens to hair when you completely stop cutting it at all. It gets thinner and thinner at the bottom. People mistakenly believe that this means the ends are 'damaged' and 'ragged' and 'broken.' But that is NOT what causes tapering. Tapering is caused by the growth pattern of the hair.

Imagine if you shaved your head and then grew your hair. You would notice that your hair was now 'layered.' The hairs on top of your head, on the crown of the head, are higher than the hairs growing from the back of your neck, at the nape. The ends of the crown hairs can never 'catch up' to the ends of the nape hairs, which are several inches down further.

Imagine if all hairs were programmed to grow to be only twelve inches long. All of your hair would stop at twelve inches. So you would notice, forever and ever, that the ends of your crown hair would never catch up with the ends of the nape hair, because they were all the same length but they originated at different points on the scalp. If you put your hair into a ponytail or something, it would be thick at the top and thin at the bottom of the ponytail. (I'm doing all this without drawing a visual diagram. A diagram would speak a thousand words.) If you obsessively tried to force the ponytail to be a constant thickness, then you would have to chop off a lot of hair to make sure that all the hairs were lined up and there was no tapering down to a thin point. (I really do need a diagram!)

That's how it is, except that it doesn't stop at six inches, it stops at, like, several feet of length. So it's down at the bottom of your back or your waist or wherever and it looks like it's broken and damaged and that seems to be why it's tapering to a thinner and thinner point. That is a misunderstanding of what it's really doing.

Well, anyway... 'they' told me to stop cutting all split ends whatsoever. Don't even worry about twisting and trimming. Don't be tempted. That's been the theme over and over again - get used to giving up a comforting routine, and resist the temptation to do it again. Cut nothing. Don't cut the ends. So again, that was 'their' suggestion, not mine. I was doing something different until they suggested that I stop. I didn't come up with this idea myself.

3. So, after I had decided to grow it to terminal length, and then, after I decided to stop trimming the split ends, there was one more thing 'they' convinced me to do. They suggested that I stop using shampoo. I had been asking questions about dreadlocks for a while, wondering what they were and how they formed. I knew there were dogs and donkeys and some other animals that had natural dreadlocks, but I didn't understand the mechanics of what causes the hair to get that way.

'They' didn't just tell me that I was going to get dreadlocks. They simply said to stop using shampoo, without knowing what would happen. I didn't know that I was going to get dreadlocks. I only knew that I was quitting shampoo.

So I read about this on the internet. There are other people who are quitting shampoo for various reasons, but they are all trying to find substitutes for shampoo, such as bar soap. They usually want to avoid the chemicals, like sodium lauryl sulfate, which goes through your skin.

(I personally haven't experienced any noticeable health problems from that chemical, because it doesn't cause extremely severe symptoms at low dosages. It might be doing SOMETHING that I'm not aware of, but whatever it is, it's mild, and I tolerated it. I only notice reactions to things that are severe. That's similar to how well I tolerate bleach. I really don't mind chlorine bleach at all, and I use a bleach spray all the time at work. The degreaser bothers me very badly, and it burns my skin painfully, and I won't use that stuff at all, but I don't mind bleach in the least. I only get sick from bleach if, for instance, you dump a bunch of straight undiluted bleach on the floor and then mop the floor, with the windows closed. THEN I WILL NOTICE IT! Because I think somebody actually did that one time, but I forget who it was! It was horribly sickening and disgusting and toxic. But at low levels, in sprays and bathroom cleaners, I don't mind it and I actually enjoy the smell of bathroom cleaner with a little bit of bleach in it. Not that I sit there deliberately inhaling it.)

So I stopped using shampoo. I didn't try to find substitutes for shampoo, and I didn't use bar soap. This was just an experiment.

It became obvious after a couple weeks that I was going to develop dreadlocks for sure. My hair became sticky, greasy strings. It was like chewing gum. I tried a couple times to comb it, but even my wide toothed comb wasn't able to get through the chewing gum grease.

The dreadlocks began by themselves at the roots. It has nothing to do with tangling. The dreadlocks websites talk about tangling, but tangling is not necessary. The greasy strings keep the hairs stuck together. Underneath those stuck-together hair strands, new hair is growing. But it has nowhere to go because it's trapped underneath this 'tent' of stuck-together strands of hair, which closes over top of the new hair growing in and keeps it trapped down there. So the hair loops and bends as it struggles to grow outwards and can't. As it loops and bends, it interlocks with other hairs next to it that are also looping and bending. (This is from my microscopic examination of my own dreadlocks as I struggle to understand why they are forming. It requires good eyesight.) On the outside of the locks, the hairs wrap around the lock in both directions, and it reminds me of a mesh shielded cable (image needed). Those outer hairs do indeed tangle into knots, but the hair inside the lock is just interlocking together as it loops and bends while growing under the enclosed barrier of hair.

So... that is what happened. And the three things that I listed were not my own ideas. They were given to me by someone else. These things don't occur to you if you were raised to keep doing things a certain way.

So the thing about not growing beards is exactly like that. Men don't grow beards, and they have reasons why they don't. They don't know how sexy beards can be and I can't talk about this because I have to go to work. I'm reluctant to talk about sexual topics (although 'they' often want me to), but, depending on the mood I'm in, I'll look at a guy's beard and want to lick the edges of it along his neck - that's the part that they usually shave off, too. They'll grow the beard only on the face, but they'll shave off the part that grows under the chin and neck, which is VERY FRUSTRATING to me. That part under the chin and neck is the sexiest part, especially for a girl who is shorter than you are and her face is right underneath your chin when you're hugging her. Again, I don't have time for this now because I'm off to work.

The summary of all this is that they're doing it because of their beliefs, and because nobody ever told them any differently.

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