Reflections On Interviews and the Day

Free write:

I've learned a lot from interviewing over the past couple weeks. In my conversations, I have heard a variety of perspectives--people influenced by europeanization directly, people indirectly influenced, and people who were barely influenced. I think I expected for most to be really impacted by european culture, but most were either indirectly or barely impacted by it.

One thing that also popped up for me today is that I may pay to much attention to my hair. I had never really considered this until an interview today. A girl I talked to spoke about how she may consider cutting her hair because she may be focused on it when at the end of the day its just hair. This really resonated with me.

I spend hours on my hair: washing it, conditioning it, detangling it, braiding it, and failing at "whatever"-outs. I just stayed up last night until 3 messing around with it actually. But I think I need to ask myself if I am really embracing my hair. Because it seems like me braiding it every night is just another way of "controlling" it so that it is still acceptable for school. Also, I feel like I'm doing all of this out of need sometimes and not out of excitement. Surely I enjoy it, but very rarely do I feel like I am doing it for me. So I want to continue to explore this because I think it changes the direction of my project. Maybe black hair is political because it has been forced upon us. Our hair's ability to represent so many things gives it a lot of power and that can be liberating, but it can also be a burden. I want to continue to explore this idea, because I had never considered it before today.