Relaxer Disaster!

A common idea about people who have gone natural or are in the process of doing so is that they hate relaxed hair and that chemical alteration of texture should be thrown out the window.
I'm not going to speak for everyone else but personally, if it's done right, a relaxer isn't bad!




However if you encounter a stylist who DOES NOT have a grip on what they're doing, it can turn into a nightmare, trust me I KNOW.
I've had some horrible relaxer jobs and have had to deal with severe scalp burns and bald patches. From at home treatments to salon visits, I've seen it all and it sucked.

First experience: I was very young, I want to say 12, and my aunt decided that we were going to experiment on my hair with a take home relaxer. I wasn't nervous, in fact I was excited! A chance for straight hair? No more braids? Sign me up! What no one told my aunt and what I didn't
know is that when it starts to burn, it's time to wash it out! Five minutes in and it started to hurt. We ignored it.
15 minutes in and I was close to tears. 
I bent myself over the bathtub and my mother began to rinse my hair. all of a sudden she started panicking and yelling, I looked down and the
noticed A LOT of my hair was going down the drain.
I ended up with some with small bald patches, thin hair and a few scalp sores. I was calm about it and told myself "never again!" Never again lasted until high school.

High school: This is where my hair insecurity began. I didn't want my little girl braids anymore or my pigtails. I wanted grown-up straight hair! My mother has very wavy, natural mermaid hair, but her stylist specialized in relaxed hair...or so we thought.
I went to her throughout my high school career enduring the high-strength cream, the scalp burns and her flat-iron meanness until she moved states. Something I'd noticed throughout our time together was that she would always coat ALL of my hair and not just my new growth. I didn't think much else of it until I found a new stylist (Miss K) and she told me that she needed to save my hair.
SAVE MY HAIR?
Turns out stylist #1 had been "overlapping" the relaxer. She'd been treating my whole head of hair as virgin hair and repeatedly re-relaxed my already chemically-treated ends.
In order to fix it, Miss K said we needed to start from scratch. This is when devastation set in.

Length: natural growth+relaxed hair hit a little past my shoulders.
Saving my hair meant cutting it a little below my ears.
ALL MY LENGTH HAD BEEN A LIE!
I dealt with it. I kept going back to Miss K and she helped grow my hair back thicker and longer.

Sounds like a happy ending right? So you may ask why I chose to go natural.
Truth is I got very bored with my hairstyle and its breakage.
I wanted to do more with it and I also wanted to stop being so insecure about it!
I was so inspired by other women that I made the big decision to go ahead with it and Miss K is helping me through the process.

So moral of the story, relaxers are not the devil, but they can ruin a good head of hair if you don't know what your doing with it!