A couple of months ago, somebody asked me a question that would change my perception of myself. What would my hair be like if I didn’t relax it? It was far from the first time I’d heard this. People usually get curious once they learn that my Angolan-Portuguese mother is of a rich moka complexion. This is sometimes hard to guess since I’ve inherited quite a fair skin tone from my French-Canadian father, but in my childhood my hair had always been the obvious give-away.

A year ago, I would have told you that relaxing my hair made it easier for me to manage it and gave me more styling options. I’ve been chemically straightening my hair since I was about 12, so I have very little idea on how to care for it in its natural state and the process of growing it would take possibly years. A commitment I never had the will or courage to take on, until now.  Today I realize I was really trying to escape the stigma my natural hair carries, which is a feeling shared by many African-American women.

This is an issue that Chris Rock addressed in his 2009 documentary Good Hair. The comedian exposes how much money, energy, time, sweat and tears, women with so called nappy hair, put into making it resemble a white woman’s hair. To give you an idea, 80 per cent of all hair products in the U.S. are sold to black women. Rock decided to dive into the subject after his four-year-old daughter asked him why she didn’t have good hair. A feeling I definitely shared growing up.

I went through adolescence in the 2000s, the era of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson. Flat irons were a way of life. Everyone had long silky blonde hair, even Beyonce. But not me. It wouldn’t have been an issue if the other kids hadn’t made sure I knew this was in fact unusual, but you can’t blame children for being children.

If you must know, I’m not complaining about some light teasing here. I’ll just say this, it’s hard to build confidence and fit into a community after one of the girls in your class spits in your face and calls you a nigger on your first day of school. Specially when nobody, not one responsible adult — and there were plenty around — steps in to defend you. I wish I’d stepped up for myself, but to be honest, I didn’t understand what was going on. The lesson I internalized that day is that there was something wrong with me.

Former model Tyra Banks got very involved in the discussion that was sparked by Good Hair. She went as far as organizing a big reveal of her “natural” hair, which ended up being a rather empty gesture. Later, when she was asked what she meant by natural, she explained it would be “a hundred per cent absolutely impossible” to show what her natural hair looks like. “It could take up to five years for my hair to grow out and for you to see what it looks like without the relaxer. So it wasn’t my natural hair as in what god gave me in terms of the texture, but it was my real hair, which means no tracks, no weave or extensions,” she answered the puzzled, Caucasian woman from her audience.

This is a perfect example of how addictive creamy crack quickly becomes. Creamy crack is a slang word for relaxer, and much like drugs, users have a hard time visualizing their existence without it. To be fair, would you invest five years of your life into growing shoulder length hair?

Well if you’re up to the challenge, the next tricky task on your list is to find expertise as to how to care for your natural hair. The Internet surely provides a lot of information about how to clean, moisturize and style your African/Mixed mane. But what works for one person’s hair might not for the next. I also needed to find a person qualified to cut away the remnants of my chemically treated hair. If finding a decent, reliable and knowledgeable hairdresser here in Montreal had been impossible in the past, it would be a fool’s errand now.

Experience taught me to run if a hairdresser uttered the words, “Wow! Your hair has such an interesting texture, doesn’t it?” In other words, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” I’ve also tried to find a decent Haitian or Jamaican salon to refer to in the past. Unfortunately, all of the ones I visited told me that to achieve the curly natural texture I wanted my hair to be, I would have to use a specific perm or have a weave done. Obviously, chemicals were already off the table, and the whole point of this journey was to learn to care for my natural hair, which meant that resorting to extensions and weaves didn’t seem like an option either. Also, I knew that what they were telling me was wrong. I have pictures of my hair natural curled and loose as a kid. When I asked my mother how she did it, she says she can’t remember.

You see, my mother started relaxing her hair regularly only after immigrating to Canada. She never had to care for her hair on her own before and found the local Haitian salons lacked the expertise she was accustomed to in Africa and Portugal. Also, she finds it makes her hair easier to manage and that it looks “cleaner” that way.

I started accosting anybody I saw whose hair I liked and asked them how they did it. People referred me to their hairdressers and shared their tricks. One girl even told me if I washed my hair with beer my perm would go away. I didn’t try it. Nothing I heard sounded like what I was searching for.

After approaching yet another weave-wearing stranger, her Hispanic lunch partner was the unlikely source of the next clue in my quest for healthy, natural, strong-independent-black-woman hair. “My daughter is mixed just like you and I had a hard time learning how to care for her hair properly,” she told me. “I don’t want to straighten her hair with chemicals since she’s so young. I found a salon who specializes in dealing with natural hair for black and mixed people.” Hallelujah.

When I entered the Inhairitance salon, a couple of blocks away from Atwater market, I was warmly welcomed. The male receptionist and his luscious dreadlocks smiled as if to say, “Welcome sister, you need no longer wander the streets without hope, this place shall offer shelter.”

“I’ve been growing my hair for about two months and I am looking for guidance through this process,” is the gist of what I told him. I was kindly instructed to sit down while, Victoria, their hair analyst, finished with her present client.

From the couch, I gazed at all the gorgeous natural manes. Meaghan, the girl assisting Victoria, had hair exactly like that of the princess presented to be Eddie Murphy’s bride at the beginning of Coming to America. We later joked about the fact that the actress was wearing extensions for the movie, but there was none of that here.

Telling the two girls about the process of growing my hair felt similar to what I imagine confession must feel like, only more liberating. We all felt the same. “I think the hardest part was before I cut off my relaxed hair,” says Victoria, who’s been natural for a little more than two years. “I had to do a lot of research on my own before finding this place. I learned that we all have different textures that absorb moisture in varying degrees.”

And that’s the secret of curls. Moisture. But not just any moisture will do. As she and Meaghan tested different creams, Victoria gives me instruction on how to care for my hair. The porosity of one’s hair, will determine which type of hydration is needed to achieve a healthy texture. Also, she stressed the importance of using all natural products, avoiding silicon or sulfates, as they create a permeable coating over the hair, which gives it a deceivingly soft texture, but in reality have no nourishing properties as well as obstructing the ridges through which moisture would be absorbed.

Finally, she takes a picture of my curling roots with my phone and shows it to me. It was like spring on my scalp. I asked Victoria when she thought I should cut off my “dead” hair. She recommended some products to moisturize the roots properly according to my texture, to help it grow as much as possible. “Feel it out and in a month or so, you should know when you’d like to cut it,” she said. “Everyone experiences it their own way, but that’s probably the hardest part of the transition. The choice is hard between drastically cutting it short or spending a lot of time and energy styling it while it grows.”

In a way, I realize that when I decided to grow out my natural hair, I also decided to refuse to conform to the box I thought society wanted me to fit. I’m tired of wondering what I’m doing wrong and trying to hide parts of me that some may not accept. Having natural hair is still a hell of a lot of work a there are days when I feel like I’m fighting a very badly tempered shrub, but I get to tell myself that this is how I happened to have been created and that anyone who is troubled by that is the one with a problem. In the mean time, I’ll just remember Bob Marley’s words, “I’m not trying to reach people, I am what I am, and there’s a lot of others like me out there. See, I’m not trying to reach a strange people; the people that I reach, they are my people.”