Bethany Roberts Mann

It was a quiet acceptance. One that can only happen on the fourth day into a two-week trip when you’re sitting curled up at the bottom of a tiny RV shower in the pitch black, waiting for something — anything — to go right.

Curly hair is the hardest beast to tame. From an inability to brush it when it’s dry to the mountain of frizz and constant entanglement, I still haven’t learned the best way to deal with my hair — but curly hair TikTok believes it has. The secret lies in a mysterious hair texture chart that changes every time I look at it.

I aspire to have the confidence of a 13-year-old boy in a 7th grade Texas history class. He was crazy, but he knew who he was. Despite the existence of cliques that would say otherwise, we were all weird in middle school. You can’t put hundreds of tweenagers who are trying to figure themselves out in a building together five days a week and expect them to be normal.