Writing about hair was 1st step
In 2013, Nikki Walton had a thriving website, a bestselling book and a schedule packed with promotional events and appearances on TV talk shows. And yet she felt something was wrong.
“At the time, I had never felt that sad,” she said in an interview at her waterfront town house in Clearwater Beach, Florida. “I had never felt that low.”
Walton, 39, had risen to prominence as a blogger who promoted the benefits of natural hair for Black women. Under the name CurlyNikki she gave voice to those who were ready to give up straightening their hair with hot irons or chemical treatments and accept it as it was, untreated, curls and all.
It wasn’t easy for her to get to that point. As a child growing up in and around St. Louis, she would sit in the kitchen as her mother or grandmother straightened her hair with a hot comb. “And then by 10, 11, 12,” Walton recalled, “we had a stylist that comes to the house with a flat iron, and that was my whole life.”
When she started attending Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, where she majored in psychology, she took care of her hair on her own.
“That is where I came face-to-face with my hatred for my hair,” she said. “I didn’t know that I had low self-esteem because of my hair. I knew, growing up, that it had to be kept straight for us to be pretty and feel good.”
One day, during her
junior year, she let it frizz out. “And I remember going out on campus, and girls looked at me, like, ‘What are you doing?
What did you do to your hair?’ Like, ‘What is this?’ Because this was before the movement.”
And when the movement arrived, she was at the forefront. She started the website CurlyNikki. com in 2008, not long after she earned her master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling and psychology from the University of North Carolina. In her posts, she discussed hair types and hair care techniques in great detail.
Black women decided to shave off their chemically processed hair and grow it back out naturally. Sales of chemical relaxers plummeted as more and more women ditched the “creamy crack” and embraced the fullness, curls and kinks of their hair.
As the popularity of CurlyNikki.com grew, Walton started making guest appearances on “The Tyra Banks Show,” “The
Dr. Oz Show” and “Today.” In 2011, she left her job as a psychotherapist in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Things kept picking up until she hit that whatdoes-it-all-mean moment in 2013.
“I never had time to just be,” Walton said, her hair wrapped in a scarf.
She threw herself into a lengthy study of spirituality and religion, reading more than 600 books on the subjects, by her count. She got into the habit of
waking up before dawn, and she meditated, sometimes for as long as four hours at a time.
Little by little, her marriage to her college sweetheart broke apart.
“If you were to ask him, he always says, ‘Nikki found God and I didn’t,’ ” she said, adding that her former husband, with whom she had two children, is still her best friend.
These days, she has shifted her focus from writing about hair care to podcasting about spirituality. Living with her children in the townhouse overlooking Clearwater Bay, she wakes up at 4 a.m. and meditates before she records the latest installment of “Go(o)d Mornings With CurlyNikki,” a daily series made up of 5- to 10-minute episodes.
The show, which draws from a variety of religious and spiritual traditions, is meant to help listeners start the day in a tranquil frame of mind.
As of June 28, her listeners can ask her questions directly on a new live podcast, part of a deal she has recently signed with Spotify.
Walton sees her move into wellness and spirituality as the next logical step of the work she started in 2005, when she was posting her thoughts on natural hair in online forums.
“I did not even really see how natural hair was connected to this in the beginning,” Walton said. “But it is the same continuum, it is the same journey. You are just tearing away more layers.”