Hi, I’m Zainab. I’m a student, a wannabe writer, and…oh yeah, a black woman.

Being a black woman has its own particular brand of challenges. I mean yes, there’s the regular old combined racism and sexism, which does suck, but there is one brand challenge that all black girls face within themselves.

Every black girl must search within herself to find the strength needed to battle her lifelong adversary: her hair.

For as long as racism has been around, black women’s hair has been, to put it kindly, a topic of discussion. Many people seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around black women’s hair. Hell, for one thing it grows up instead of down like everyone else’s.

For 18 years of my life, I was one of those people who had no understanding of naturally-textured black hair. In fact, for my entire childhood, I’d gone through the process of chemically straightening it just so I wouldn’t have to deal with it and so I could feel normal.

After making the decision to go natural at the end of high school, I was lost.

I had no idea what to do. I had no idea how to care for my hair. I couldn’t even remember what my hair looked like in its natural state because my mother had relaxed it when I was around 4 years old.

I made it my mission to find out as much about my hair as humanly possible. And I did.

Now it’s time for me to share some of my knowledge with the rest of you who have decided to embark on this journey along with me. Together we can learn all we need to know about black hair: its maintenance and its styling. Together we can learn to detangle our hair, one knotted strand at a time.