Meant to be

Growing up, growing older, and growing into my own skin

“I was meant to be someone else,” a line from Philip Levine’s poem pops into my head as I’m in the bathroom, trying to tame my hair into something that resembles intention instead of surrender. The curls are doing what they always do. They puff up at the top, flatten at the sides, and frizz where there should probably be definition. There is nothing glamorous about it. It looks like I stuck my finger into an electrical socket and then pretended it was intentional.

I was meant to be the girl who let her hair go wild and big. At least, that was the version of myself I believed I was supposed to grow into. The one whose curls announce her before she even crosses the doorway. The one strangers ask to touch in coffee shops.

“Can I just feel it? It looks amazing.”

“No, you may not run your hands through my hair, stranger,” I would say, while secretly enjoying the attention.

Instead, I spent years with my head under a blow dryer, chasing a version of straight hair that never quite belonged to me. I was taught early that straight was beautiful, desired. That smooth meant put together. No one warns curly girls that dancing in the rain is not an option if you are trying to pass as someone you are not.

Before I convinced my mom to let me own a flat iron, I wore my hair pulled back in the same low bun every single day. When I visited my middle school years later, the woman at the front desk squinted at me and smiled.

“You still wear your hair exactly the same way. You haven’t changed one bit.” I realized I had been doing that low bun for more than a decade. It wasn’t a style. It was camouflage.

Now there are entire corners of the internet devoted to curls. Women holding up bottles and diffusers, promising transformation. I can type “curly method” into YouTube and lose two hours. I can tame it more than I used to, shape it into something closer to harmony. I can coax out ringlets if I have patience. It is better. I am better. Still, I don’t feel like the woman who was meant to rock them. I am someone in between. A person who has spent a lifetime negotiating with her own reflection.

It’s not just the hair. It never is. It’s the larger story of who I thought I was meant to become, and how often I have tried to live up to an outline I never actually wrote.

I was meant to be powerful, or so the younger version of me believed. I imagined I was the kind of person who walks into a room with a story on their tongue and holds everyone there with their words. I pictured a confident creative, an artist in motion, hands messy with paint or bread dough or ink.

There are moments when that version of me leans close, reminding me she still exists, nudging me toward the woman I once imagined I’d grow into.

So for my birthday, I bought myself an experience. I booked a boudoir photoshoot because I didn’t want to keep carrying the same old story into a new decade. I told myself it was a “to appreciate later” gift, but beneath that was a quieter truth. I hoped the session might help me view myself differently, even while part of me feared it would only confirm the things I’d spent years avoiding. I wanted something I could look back on and say, There—there was the woman I kept refusing to see.

I stood in front of a stranger in a bodysuit that hugged every part of me, and something inside me uncoiled in a way I didn’t expect. We picked poses that hid what I always try to hide and highlighted what I always forget I have. When she flipped the camera around to show me, I felt something startlingly close to acceptance. For a second I thought, there she is. The one I was meant to be. Later, alone, I clicked through the images again and again, surprised to feel pride rather than the usual inventory of flaws.

I don’t know when we start to learn that we should want to be someone else, when the mirror becomes a measuring stick instead of a witness. I don’t remember ever wishing for a different body or hair at five, or six, or seven. Little kids do not poke at their thighs and wonder about gaps. They do not flat iron their hair into submission. They run. They climb. They ask someone they love to watch, as if their existence alone is worth noticing.

I watch my own daughters who have no reason not to love their own bodies, curly hair, or personalities. They are so unapologetic with who they are, so certain that they are already exactly who they are meant to be. And I guess that my job is to try to preserve as much of that confidence as the world will allow. I want to protect what they already know about themselves, even on the days I forget it for myself.

Sitting here with my unruly curls, thinking about those few minutes when I recognized myself without flinching, I wonder if the poem was wrong. Or maybe I only misread it. Maybe I was meant to be someone else, yes. Someone I have been slowly remembering.