Greetings! I've had my dreads for six years as of February 2013. They are my love, my pride and joy and we've had such a great journey together. People always ask me how long I'll have them and of course I say "forever!" I'll start from the beginning. I had a stylist start my dreads for me because I wanted them to be some what uniform. She used the backcombing method and so that's how I learned to maintain them. About 9 months or so after I got them started I bleached them....big mistake. It was the first time I'd ever even colored my hair...they got totally fried and in a week I had little fuzzy balls just falling out of my dreads. I put hemp around the really week ones to save them and kept it on for a couple of years. In the mean time, once I decided I'd never do that again, they began growing and raging-just beautiful, thick, growing fast, fantastic. So when they got pretty long I took of all my hemp "bandaids" and let them take their course. Slowly but surely every single one fell off from that point when I'd had my hair bleached...which I expected, so I was prepared for it. I thought, "no big deal, they're growing beautifully now and will be super long and thick eventually." Over the past two and a half years though, they've been gradually getting thinner and thinner. I didn't make too big of a deal at first, I just started combining a lot of them to get thicker, which they did at first, but now even those have gotten super thin at the root and several are now splitting apart at the root. I've put hemp around some again, but still they're split at the root. When I look at pics from about three years ago, I can see that in the first two years after the bleaching, they grew about 7-8 inches. In the following three years they've only grown about 5 inches and as I said have gradually been thinning. I've always used the backcombing method, back combing them all once or twice a month. My diet has not changed. Why has my growth changed so drastically?? I'm getting really upset at this point, many bald spots are now showing and hardly any new loose hairs sprouting. I can't even really put any more together because they are all too far apart from each other to want to go together. I have been on a new birth control pill for the past year and a half, but that still doesn't explain the year and a half prior that in which they really started thinning. I don't know what to do. If I stop backcombing, every time I wash them, they just look thin and sad and don't seem to dread by themselves. I'm going to switch back to my old birth control but I'm just not too confident that that's going to fix it. Please help!
updated by @korey-danley: 02/14/15 09:43:54AM
