How I Got Curly Hair (a hint, I wasn't born that way)

In case no one has seen the awesomeness that is my adorable little self with my cute blonde hair in paint form, here it is.

I put the bow on so you know I'm a girl!

In case no has seen my normal paint self, which causes me to wonder who you thought that was all this time, here it is, too.

Clearly the most epic person on the internet...

 Now, unless you're the kind of person who knows a lot about hair and how it can change, you might be a little  suspicious about why I was so cute and blonde when I was little, and why I happen to have dark curly hair now, you might also be wondering about the glasses, but that's explained way more easily: I was near sighted my whole life and no one noticed me squinting really hard to see until I was in middle school.

I have two things to say about this picture... Yes, my hair looked like that, and looking at it, I have to wonder why I wondered why people always thought I was mistakenly mad at them...

 Of course, that creates interesting pictures and makes you wonder why no one ever noticed me making that face, and I really wish it could help explain why exactly I was so bad with faces, but it doesn't... I'm just bad with faces, and names. I once became friends with a girl because in gym class I became friends with this girl who was tall, thin, had straight blonde hair, and glasses. The next day in gym class I saw a girl who looked vaguely familiar and started talking to her... She was short, had a huge butt, and had short, curly, red hair... the only thing they had in common was glasses...

 I thought they were the same girl...

Clearly something is wrong with me, but you already knew that.

Clearly there was also something wrong with them if they became friends with this face...

But this isn't the story about how I'm so awkward with remembering people that complete strangers sometimes come up to me and start conversations during which I sit there the whole time trying desperately to remember where I know them from, or how I managed for years to pass eye exams while making a face that some people only make on the brightest day of the year when they're at the beach and the sun is glaring directly into their eyes... This is the story of how I went from thick, straight, super long blonde hair to having short, still thick, dark curly hair...

 My head was shaved.

When I was six years old I was living with two of my aunts, both of their husbands, two of my cousins, and my older brother. This was a household that was... how shall I say this simply...? They were pretty open to my tomboyish ways.

This did happen... And that kid didn't go to school the next day.

And I was quite the tomboy. I played in traffic, thought I could walk everywhere, got into fights, ignored other little girls because playing with dolls was dumb, and really only played with boys because they were all I had to play with and I wanted to live up to the expectations of my older brother... I was a lot like the Terror in this.

Brrrooooooothhheeeeeerrrrr...

 Still, I was a pretty open and friendly little kid, super outgoing, really mischievous, and I let everyone play with my hair. Who wouldn't want to? It was thick and long enough it reached past my butt and strawberry blonde. I loved my hair. I washed it all by myself every morning and kept it clean and brushed.

 My head was the perfect storm for lice.

I spent most of the 1st grade out of school because I kept lice. They never left. Every time I went back to school they had returned, magically, overnight. I practically bathed in lice shampoo. My clothes were kept in black bags. I wasn't allowed to sleep on a bed... of course, that might be because my aunts were the embodiment of pure evil, but I digress...

Eventually the effort to win the war against my lice became so bad that my aunt decided to cut my hair.

First to my shoulders...

Then to my ears when she realized she couldn't cut hair to save her life.

And it was still crooked...

We thought that was the end of that and I went back to school, feeling cold and lightheaded, by when I passed the school nurse's lice check, I was happy. Looking more like a boy that before, my behavior wasn't considered all that weird anymore, but I still looked slightly like a girl.

Then they did another lice check and my lice had come back... bigger, stronger, and looking like super lice. I can still remember the school nurse standing over my head saying, "Why are they invisible? Should they be transparent? This isn't normal..." to herself.

With no other options remaining, my aunt shaved all of my hair off, and we won the war against lice...

 Only now I didn't look like a little girl at all, I looked like a little boy, and I got treated like one. No one told me I was "so cute" or "so pretty" anymore, or asked to play with my hair, or if they could brush it or braid it... I didn't realize how much I'd liked the attention until it was gone.

That year I went back to live with my mom and she was devastated. I was practically bald and didn't look a thing like a little girl, and my momma was a very girly woman. She dressed me up like a girl in all pink so people would know I was a girl, kept me from playing in the road, and stopped me from playing with the boys... not that I had much choice, that was the stage where girls were icky to them and they refused to play with me... and the girls refused to play with me because I was too rough.

I only had one friend, the boy who lived across the street... and that was because he liked me. He kissed me on the cheek.

 It was a few more years before my hair got to my shoulder blades again, only now it was more of a dark dirty blonde and it was sort of wavy... Mom loved it. She highlighted it champagne blonde and curled it up like hers, and I managed to become a little more girly for all her efforts...

"Are we really twins, mommy?!"

 And then one day when I was twelve she looked at my had and told me, "I bet if we cut if off it'll be curly... Look at that wave, I bet you that the weight of your hair is the only thing stopping it." With an inability to predict the future, I let her. She was right, my hair curled right up, and for all of a day I was super cute...

The only problem was, I didn't know how to take care of curly hair. I brushed it when it was dry, had no idea about conditioners, didn't know what to do with it when it was frizzy... before long it looked like I was making a half-assed attempt at an afro. It kind of wilted in the middle too much to be a real afro, and it hung down too low in the back...

Also,  I made this face...

 The first day of middle school, four boys licked Skittles and threw them at the back of my head to see if they would stick... I was teased relentlessly, every day, about it... When I graduated from high school, I was still dealing with people yelling, "Skittles, taste the rainbow!" at me in the hallway... then again, the accident with the hair-dye in 7th grade probably didn't help refute that...

... It actually looked worse than this...

There are reasons why I'm an awkward not-quite-member of society.