Today we’d like to introduce you to Mariah Woods.
Mariah, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
A five years old runs to the living room of her apartment on Christmas morning, anxious to see if Santa (Mommy) brought her any of the things on her list, any of the things she saw on the commercials she watched on a constant loop in between cartoons: Bratz, Barbies, luxury cars and accessories.
As she tears through tons of carefully wrapped presents, discovering off brand toys, socks, and underwear, her disappointment mounts, but the last rectangular present looks promising. As she unwraps the present, her shoulders and heart sink, and tears well in her eyes. When her mother, masking the pain on her face, asks what’s wrong, she says of her Black Cabbage Patch doll, “it’s ugly.”
It looked like me. Everyone compared me to a Cabbage Patch doll as a child, and I thought it was sweet until I was confronted with it instead of the ethnically ambiguous Bratz doll I expected to receive. I vividly remember the pain on my stoic mother’s face when she realized that my disappointment stemmed not from the present itself but from the fact that any illusions of what I thought I looked like had been shattered. I was Black. I was fat. I had short and nappy hair. The way I understood it, beauty meant changing all of those things.
Beauty didn’t look like my chubby cheeks or smell like my hot combed hair or my brown skin. It smelled like a perm, crash diets, and abandoning the way I was raised. Beauty felt like shame and I thought that was the price of happiness for people who looked like me.
Shame followed me from my childhood into my teen years, manifesting itself into a full-blown depression because it wasn’t just the television telling me I wasn’t enough anymore, it was everyone around me. I tried everything I could think of to quiet the voices: every diet that made me hate eating, every trend that made me feel unlovable, and every hairstyle that gave me migraines. It didn’t matter how unaffordable or unattainable it was, I always felt that every step I took further away from my Blackness was a step closer to being as happy as everyone else.
Everything in my life felt out of my control: I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted until something or someone told me I was doing it wrong. Everything about me felt wrong. It was an exhausting existence, until one morning when I decided not to wake up an hour before everyone else—and the sun— to straighten my thick 4C hair and slick it down with gel into a headache inducing tight ponytail, then stick myself with too many bobby pins to secure my fake bun to my head. Instead, I rubbed some Cantu leave-in conditioner into my scalp to give my 4C hair the illusion of 3C, and, unknowingly, stepped into the freedom of discovering myself for myself.
The blanket of shame that consumed my life was lifted when I started college and, for the first time, met people who challenged things in life I had come to accept as universal truths about Blackness, about my body, about my existence. Ideas about Blackness, hair, fashion, sex, love, body types, language, media, whiteness, everything that had burdened my childhood, and everything that I didn’t know I didn’t know washed over me like a tidal wave of relief, wonderment, excitement and anger. I felt everything I spent years repressing.
I felt joy because for the first time, I didn’t feel shame about the way I was raised or where. I felt pride in my culture, my body, my hair, my voice, my Blackness, and in my discovery of all of the Black women who wore it like a badge of honor, no matter how visible or comprehensible it was to the world at large. That’s what I want to share with all of you.
I spent too much of my life— my formative years— aspiring to whiteness and hating myself because it was all that I saw and so I thought that was all there was. We need to lift other Black women up as we climb and share as we discover because there are Black girls out there with more access to information than ever before. They’re being fed many different narratives about their existence and feeling locked into an identity carved for them by people that don’t look like or understand them— and don’t care to, so this is for them, for my friends, for my five years old self, and for all of the Black girls out there in transition in their lives.
We are creating content from the plethora of life experiences we’ve had, are having, and are manifesting for the future, celebrating the achievements of Black women breaking barriers today, and paying homage to the Black women who made it possible for us to dream as big as we all can.
We want to take this journey of self-love and self-discovery together. This is Textured Heir, a platform for the metamorphosis of Black women.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Absolutely not! I am the hardest working person I know and my own toughest critic. I want things to be perfect, but I also know that the goal is progression not perfection, which has become my 2020 motto. I’ve struggled with getting and keeping women involved in this project because we’re such a small organization and I cannot pay anyone (yet), and everyone is busy trying to keep their sanity. Being open with my trauma, my failures, my mistakes has been a struggle but I do it because I want Black women to know they aren’t alone in their struggles. I want to share what it’s like to still be growing and changing and learning, etc. Someone needs to!
Please tell us about Textured Heir.
We’re a media company: We have a website (blog-style), Texturedheir.com, a YouTube Channel, three podcasts Does It Hold Up? in which we discuss all of the Black movies, music, etc. from our childhoods and ask whether or not it holds up today, The Blacklist, where I chronicle the lives and legacies of Black Hollywood stars from the 20th century, and a third coming in November.
Everything we do is to celebrate the metamorphosis of Black women. To celebrate Black women still growing and learning and unlearning in their journeys. To celebrate Black women of all different shapes, sizes, creeds, colors, from every corner of the country (and someday even further). I am most proud of our commitment to centering the narrative around Black womanhood. I’m most proud of our differences and how despite them, we ended up together. That is what sets us apart: we don’t have backgrounds in this, or money, or a huge team, but we are passionate about celebrating and centering Black womanhood.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Nothing. I’m proud of the lessons I’ve learned and am still learning. I’m proud of my growth. I wear it as a badge of honor.
Contact Info:
- Website: Texturedheir.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @Texturedheir @Mariahnwoods
- Twitter: @Texturedheir @Mariahnwoods
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwoHaKZGm6naq6JbJ5Y4dXA
Image Credit:
Mariah Woods, Camille Young, Lyndan Wambua
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