I thought it would be weird to share my hair story with people, how much is reflects different times in your life, but I've read some stories on here and realised a lot of people had very similar stories so here's mine

As a little girl I always had long blonde hair, my mum believed girls should have long hair so we never had to cut it and it was nice back then. When I got to about 13 my hair started going dark and I was horrified, I thought you could only be beautiful if you had long blonde hair (maybe Barbie had something to do with that) so I started bleaching my hair and I wouldn't allow even the tiniest bit of regrowth so I was bleaching and bleaching and as you can imagine my hair was breaking off and looked like straw, it even had gone green at some stages, so it was a mess.

Then I went the other way, having been bullied at school and having problems at home, among other things, I then went black! I started dying my hair black and all I would hear from my parent was how horrible it was so I started switching back and forth, blonde to black, blonde to black, but I guess it was never quite blonde again, a streaky black orange mess. I was also cutting my hair all the time, if I was having a bad day I would take it out on my hair, and I read on this site and agree that it was a control issue.

Then when I was 17 my hair didn't even look like hair any more, nothing I did to it made it look passable so I ended up shaving it all all! As scary as that thought may be I actually felt a lot calmer at that time, like I could just blend in and nobody noticed me anymore and nobody could comment on my hair and I didn't have to think about my hair because it was all gone!

It grew back though and I started messing with it again, going black, going blonde, and everything in between. Then I got a boyfriend and he liked it being as blonde and long as possible, which I did for a while but we all know bleach and long hair don't often go hand in hand so it was a mess once again and I just didn't feel like it was really me anymore. So I stopped bleaching it and just wanted my natural colour back, even though he harassed me to bleach it and said my natural hair colour was horrible and boring.

But I stuck with it and did not want to go down the hair abuse path anymore, I just wanted to be myself and I think all those years of dyeing was just me trying to be someone else. So it's been about two or three years since I last dyed my hair and about 6 months since I cut the last bits of dye off the ends, and you know, I absolutely love my hair colour and can't believe I spent so long covering it up and doing what other people wanted me to do with it, so now I want to grow it long again as a way of celebrating my freedom from hair abuse and the fact I'm happy just being me again