All That is Wrong With my Hair: Where the Hell is my Length?

Lately, I've been taking a good look at my hair. Ever since the beginning of my hair journey 4 months ago, I've been washing and deep conditioning my hair weekly, moisturizing and sealing almost daily, protective styling (bunning), alternating moisture and protein and staying away from heat. So where the hell is my length? My progress? Some of you might think that 4 months is not long enough too see any real progress and that I'm being impatient. But I really don't think so. When I look at the amount of new growth I've gained in the past 12 weeks, I realize that my hair grows pretty fast. So why aren't I retaining  length? Well, I  examined my hair and here are some of the issues I believe I need to correct in order to obtain healthy relaxed hair and retain my length.  

Dryness. That has always been the main issue. Regardless of how much moisture I infuse into my strands, my hair just won't stay moisturized. It's unbelievable. No matter how soft my hair feels after a good deep conditioning session, it will go right back to being dry in the next two days, if not earlier. Sometimes I moisturize and seal twice a day and I still end up with dry hair the morning after.  This issue has lead me to conduct a few tests on my hair and the jury has reached a verdict: my hair is highly porous. 

Breakage. As you know, with dryness comes brittleness which results in breakage. My has been doing a lot of that lately. I swear, it just snaps whenever I touch it or pull it just a teeny bit. Especially my ends.

Split ends. Trichoptilosis. Whatever you call it, no one likes them. Especially me. They, however, seem to be very fond of me. It doesn't matter how often I trim them. They just keep coming back. I even get the ones that are way up on the hair shaft. As a result of this unrequited one-sided love,  my ends are breaking-off, thin, see-through and aren't retaining length.

Shedding. My shedding has been out of control lately. I've never been one to lose more than 10-20 hairs a day. I know studies say that the amount of hair we shed every day is between 100 and 150 strands, but not my hair. I just don't shed that much. I detangle once a week on wash days and even then, I have very few hairs on my comb. However, these past few days, I've noticed a lot of long strands with the white bulb still attached to it coming off. Maybe I'm a little paranoid. But I still plan on doing that garlic mask I bought the other day.

Sore, dry, itchy scalp. I don't know what's up with my scalp lately. It's always sore and itchy. I'm unusually tender-headed. I'm always careful  of not putting anything directly on my scalp for fear of blocking my pores and preventing hair growth. But maybe that's the problem. Maybe I neglected my scalp.

I should probably take some of the blame: I have been known to sometimes sleep without a scarf or a bonnet, although I haven't done that in awhile and I haven't always been very diligent in moisturizing and sealing my ends everyday (I would sometimes do it every 2 days). Not to mention that I have a severe case of hand-in-hair disease. I know, shame on me.

But really it all comes back to one thing: porosity. Hair that is reasonably porous will receive and retain moisture, thus preventing the dryness, brittleness and breakage I am currently experiencing.

Stay tuned because I'll be writing a couple of posts in the coming weeks to tell you guys how I plan on tackling these issues and also to keep myself in check.

So what are some of the issues you ladies are battling on your hair journey?