This post was originally published on May 14, 2015.It was early afternoon on a Wednesday when I found myself in the chair of hairstylist and Hair Rules salon cofounder Anthony Dickey with 70% of my hair sprinkled at my feet. What the actual fuck was I thinking? I said to myself as I looked down in sadness at my fallen strands, which have seen me through my 25 years of life. Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, was what went through mind as I stood up to admire my new, tapered 'do in the mirror. Welp, what’s done is done. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let's rewind a bit. When I decided to go natural almost a year ago, I naively thought it was going to be an easy transition process that I would be able to wing my way through — I read the blogs, I watched the videos, I talked to the experts. I channeled my inner Kanye and was all, Psh, I got this. For the first couple of months, I tried to mask my chemically straightened hair and my new growth coming in by, basically, treating my hair like it was still relaxed and getting regular blowouts (bad move numero uno). As a result, I started to experience serious breakage and tangling at the point where the relaxed ends met the new growth. While I know my hair was at the lowest point health-wise than it had ever been, a part of me still wasn’t ready to let go of my scraggly-ended security blanket (bad move numero dos). I’ve always had semi-long hair and the idea of cutting it was, as trivial as it seems looking back, pretty terrifying. I’m THAT girl you’d see crying in the salon when I had to get a trim of any kind — and, no, not a drastic cut by any means, just a simple snip to rid my hair of split ends. So, I bought some time by getting box braids for a couple of months and, afterwards, wearing a hat every day for a month and some change (I wish I were kidding). It wasn’t until I had a movie-like epiphany after my mother commented, on maybe my 20th day donning said hat, “You do realise you can’t wear that thing for the rest of your life.” Let’s be honest, my initial reaction was: You don’t know my life; that’s totally doable. But, after my mid-twenties angst subsided, I realised that (gasp) she was right (cue the "mother knows best" comments). It’s only hair, after all, and it’ll grow back eventually…right? RIGHT?! I had just turned 25, moved into my first big-girl apartment, and was itching for something new. Plus, I’ve always been pretty conservative when it comes to my appearance, and this was the perfect time to shake things up a bit. So, I picked up the phone and booked the earliest appointment I could get to schedule what’s known in the natural hair community as my big chop. It was a beautiful, sunny day, which I took as a good omen — although it did start raining once we left the salon, so take that as you will — when I arrived at Hair Rules’ chic and welcoming HQ. I’d spent the past couple of days scrolling through the Instagram #bigchop hashtag trying to convince myself this was a good idea, and listened to Sara Bareilles' “Brave” all morning to prep myself for what was about to go down. “Big-chop time!” Dickey said enthusiastically when he arrived. “Yeaaaah,” I replied, clearly hesitating.