What Up With Them Dreads?

It’s all Stacie D’s fault. Blame it on @freedomtowrite with her lovely, flowing dreadlocks and thousand-watt smile—call me a copycat or chalk it up to knowing when the universe speaks to me, but whichever the case, I don’t mind admitting that she was my inspiration for doing this with my hair.

Dreadlocks are not something I thought I’d ever want. Even though I worked as a hairstylist off and on for more than twenty years and knew for a fact how clean and easy to maintain they are, it just wasn’t a look that interested me. Then over this past summer, I met Stacie D and her hubs Yeti (@freedompoint) in Nashville at the meetup where Jonny Clearwater was filming several episodes of Hots or Shots.

Stacie enters a room like a ray of light. You definitely know she’s there the moment she crosses the threshold, but she’s quiet and peaceful, radiating good energy and beaming. Within seconds after my brain formed the following thought: “I wish I could be more like that woman,” I noticed her hair. You know that little emoji with the hearts for eyes? Yeah, that was me. I’d never seen anyone wear dreadlocks with more class or style, and I knew at once that my own hair might be in trouble.

I really enjoy them. It feels like a new form of myself was born when I dreaded my hair. –Stacie D

I’ve posted about my struggles with autoimmune disease before, but some newer readers may not know that I’ve battled lupus and rheumatoid arthritis for many years. In 2010 it nearly killed me, forcing me out of work and onto potent medications and even a couple rounds of chemotherapy to get it into remission. I lost so many things I liked about myself, including the business I owned, my familiar appearance, my ability to engage in demanding physical activity, like horseback riding and remodeling my house. For me, some of the chemicals I had to put into my body were worse than the disease. Prednisone may have saved my life, but it left me with a train wreck of endocrine-related issues from which I never recovered.

A human being is incapable of understanding what true disability is until they have it themselves. Add to this the depression that comes from losing such huge parts of your identity, and you can imagine that even after the worst symptoms subsided, I still found it very difficult to bounce back. I didn’t know me anymore. I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize anything about the person I saw. Thoughts and feelings I’d never otherwise entertain crept in, and every day seemed to require more of me than I had to give.

Heartbreaking for a hairstylist is the loss of one’s own hair. I didn’t become bald at any point, but huge clumps of hair would come away with every brush stroke. Showers became an ordeal of pulling long strings of limp brown from the drain and trying to prevent more from washing down. I’d touch a flat iron to the same strands I’d straightened only months before, only to see them melt and disappear in front of my eyes. Hair color became such a skin irritant I had to stop using it. Even foiling techniques didn’t work for me because the behavior of my hair became so unpredictable. As time passed, it became too fragile to tolerate any heat or chemical process whatsoever, so I gave up. For eight years I left my hair alone except to twist it up in a clip and fluff the bangs.

Then came Steemfest. Oh, how I wanted to do more than wear my hair piled on top of my head. Cameras everywhere, pictures all over the internet—and there I was looking like granny grunt. I’m not ready for that. I don’t mind the gray in my hair. In fact, I love it. I think it’s perfect. I’ve earned every single strand of silver that I have. But the lank, lifeless mess my hair is otherwise—nope. I finally had enough. Rebellion against bad hair days rose in me like slavering grizzly. Thing was, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And as a former hairstylist, I knew exactly how to do it. But should I? On my way home from Krakow, I spent at least nine hours of a ten-hour transatlantic flight wondering how mad Stacie D would be if I totally copied her hairstyle.

With the knotting of the first dread, I knew I’d have to have extensions. It was barely longer than the bottom of my ear. No problem—I’ve worn extensions many times over the course of my life, so I knew where to buy them, how to handle them, and wasn’t intimidated at all by the prospect of integrating them with my own hair. Sadly, the selection of real human hair available here in Hillbilly Hell is fairly limited. I had a choice between black and blonde. Fine. I could go for the lighter shade and color it to match my own hair later.

Dreading my hair was a simple and rather cathartic process. I watched every episode of Psychic Detectives on YouTube as I twisted and ripped and ratted, and then started on the Netflix new releases. For a couple weeks afterward, I had to retighten almost daily. More Netflix new releases. (“Dumplin” is excellent, ladies. “Cam,” however, might get higher ratings from the guys than I’d be willing to give it.) All you dread artists out there, shut it about how much maintenance my “home dreads” have required. You have no idea how fine and fragile my hair is, how difficult it is to backcomb effectively or lock up a tangle. I used the crochet method because it’s the only thing that worked. And after about a month, all I have to do at all in the way of hair care is keep the dreads separated at the root and occasionally tighten them back down.

What do people think about my new look? I don’t know, and quite frankly, I don’t care. It’s such a relief for me to have something to put in a ponytail, or toss over my shoulder as I’m writing. I’ve retired the clip for good. I can wear my hair up, wear it down, or any combination of the two. I’m even kind of liking the blonde ends. After Christmas, I’ll probably drive an hour or two out of the area to a larger city and re-invest in better extensions, perhaps a more natural shade but still lighter than my own. I’ll go for quality this time, because I know I’ll be rocking them for a good, long while.

As for Stacie D, she took no offense at my blatant copying of her hairstyle. In fact, she became my official dreadlock mentor. LOL She provided the two photos of her that I’ve used in this post, both of which show the gorgeous side of this very unorthodox hairstyle. I’m hoping to spend a bit of time with Stacie and Yeti this summer on the road trip for Steemhouse Publishing. She and I will make quite a pair this time when we hang out together, and I can’t wait!

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