What My Hair Taught Me About Growing Back Slowly

A letter on rinse water, coconut oil, and the parts of us that take their time.

It rained last night, the kind of rain that arrives without warning and leaves the whole compound smelling like wet frangipani. This morning I washed my hair outside, under the tap by the kitchen, the way I've done almost every morning since I moved here. The water was cold. My hair, when I finally wrung it out and combed it through, felt like it belonged to someone more patient than me.

I used to fight my hair. Really fight it — blow-drying it into submission, flat-ironing away every wave it was born with, wondering why it wouldn't just behave like the hair in the pictures. It took me years, and a lot of quiet mornings like this one, to understand that hair is not a problem to be solved. It's a record. Of what you feed it, how you touch it, how much rest you let yourself have.

"Nothing that is growing needs to be rushed."

I think about that line more than almost anything else I've written to myself. It was scrawled in the back of a notebook during a season when I wanted everything — the business, the body, the hair down my back — to arrive faster than it was built to. It didn't. And slowly, I stopped asking it to.

The Comb Before the Coffee

Here is the ritual, if you can call something this simple a ritual: before anything else happens in my day, before the coffee, before the emails, I comb my hair while it's still damp, starting at the ends and working up, never the other way around. It takes four minutes. It is the only four minutes some mornings where I am doing exactly one thing. Your hair doesn't need you to multitask. It needs you to show up for it the way you'd show up for a friend who's telling you something important — slowly, without your phone in your hand.

What Coconut Oil Remembers

The women in my husband's family have been warming coconut oil between their palms and working it into their scalps for longer than anyone can trace back. Not as a trend. As a Tuesday. There is something in that kind of consistency that no serum will ever replicate — the oil itself matters less than the hands returning, week after week, to the same practice. I warm mine in a small dish, massage it into my scalp in slow circles, and leave it in for an hour before I rinse. My hairdresser back home used to say dry, brittle hair is often just tired hair. I believe her more every year.

The Mistake I Made for Years

I brushed my hair wet, every single day, pulling a fine-tooth comb through it straight out of the shower like I was late for something. I wasn't. Wet hair is at its weakest — it stretches and snaps in ways it won't when it's dry. The fix wasn't a better brush. It was patience: letting it air-dry most of the way first, detangling with fingers before a comb ever touched it, and accepting that some days it simply needed to dry in a braid instead of being handled at all.

Slow Hair, Slow Everything

What I didn't expect is how much this small, unglamorous practice would spill into the rest of my life. If I could be patient with my hair — genuinely patient, the kind that doesn't check for results every three days — I could be patient with the business, too. With the gowns that take six weeks to sew by hand. With the woman I was becoming, who was in no more of a rush than my hair was to grow back after I cut twelve inches off it two years ago in a fit of impulsive grief. It grew back. It always does. Just not on my schedule.

If there's one thing I'd want you to take from this letter, it's this: whatever you're growing right now — hair, a business, a version of yourself you're still becoming — it is already doing exactly what it needs to. Slowly. Without your permission. Let it.

A Piece for This Threshold

Origami Gown, Clay Bamboo Rayon

Soft as the inside of your wrist and cut for the body that's still arriving somewhere new. This is the gown I reach for on wash days, when my hair is drying in a loose braid and I want nothing touching my skin but something that already understands slowness.

Shop the Origami Gown →

With love from Bali,
Myrah.