We as Black women have a real complicated relationship with our hair.

The texture and length of our hair have long been tied to ideas of beauty and social acceptance — especially when it’s judged as the “right” texture and the “right” length. Too often, those standards were never designed with us in mind, yet we were expected to measure ourselves against them anyway.

I wore locs for almost six years, and it was the longest my hair had ever been. It felt good to finally have some hair — but the dye damage caught up with me, and it started looking dry and scraggly.

So voilà — now I’m rocking a bob, and it is cute.

But I’ve been thinking about the social conditioning that made me hold on to those straggly locs just because they were long — as if length alone meant beauty, progress, or worth. Sometimes we’re taught to prize the measurement more than the health, the appearance more than the truth. Cutting them felt less like loss and more like clarity.