Female Artist Of The Week: Interview With 'Tall N Curly', The Cartoonist Who Stands Out
Our "Female Artist of the Week" feature serves to draw attention to female content creators who are shaking up the world and making a difference with their art. We're all about women supporting women and providing a platform to showcase the incredible female talent out there. This week, we were lucky to grab some time with Tall N Curly, the 6 feet tall cartoonist and blogger with extremely curly hair. Her comics are all about the daily struggles of a tall girl living with curly hair and she aims to promote the message of self-acceptance, love, and body confidence, no matter what you look like, or how much you stand out from the crowd. Tall N Curly (who prefers to keep her identity anonymous), opened up to us about why she started her blog and the positive impacts she hopes and believes her cartoons are making.
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Tall N Curly's journey began when she was nine-years-old. Her extraordinarily thick and curly hair was becoming too much for her mother to handle and decided to cut it short. Unfortunately, this led to being bullied at school, where the other children teased her about her thick and unruly hair and height. The bullying sparked years of blow-drying, straightening, and chemically treating her hair, in an attempt to get it as straight and tame as possible. Over time, the excessive treatments began to have damaging effects on her hair, and take up a lot of her time. It was then that she decided it was time to embrace her natural curls.
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So how did this hair-journey inspire her to turn her struggles into art? "In 2012, the natural hair movement wasn't at its peak yet. I had decided to go natural years before that, but I still felt kind of alone and didn't know how to take care of my hair properly (I'm still not sure if I know what I'm doing most of the time today either but that's another story). I was also — and remain — quite tall at 6', and felt different for so many other reasons, that I started to vent through little drawings that I would share once in a while on a blog I had created especially for this."
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"Although I wasn't expecting anything from it. It was just my little venting space, where I would complain about how annoying it can be to be different and deal with a world that's often not kind to you or built for you. After a couple of months or so, I started to see my comics spreading on the internet, and my number of followers started to rise. Then women and girls from all over the world starting to send me messages about how good it made them feel to be able to laugh with me about natural hair issues or about being a tall girl. These messages have been my fuel since then, and that's why I'm still creating comics today."
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Tall N Curly decided to embrace her natural looks with confidence after having an overwhelming feeling of "To hell with it!" She explains that she "got to the point where I was fed up with everything that got in the way between me and me. Feeling uncomfortable with yourself makes you uncomfortable with everything in life. I got sick of it. Either because I was losing so much time on trying to change myself or simply because I didn't feel good with who I was, which I can easily – and now proudly – describe as a hypersensitive curly giraffe. I just felt like I was missing on so much in life."
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"It took me some time, it didn't happen overnight, but once the fact that I was stuck with myself until the very last day of my life made its way to my brain, I decided it was time for me to become my own best friend. I didn't want to be some kind of hypocritical weirdo who told me they loved me once in a while trying to change everything about myself the rest of the time."
Do her cartoons inspire other girls and women around the world who might be going through similar struggles to those she endured? Absolutely! Tall N Curly told us that she receives "lots of messages from women and girls of all ages and worldwide. Some ask me for some advice on how to deal with such or such a situation. I get that a lot from young girls. Some tell me that my comics have helped them. Some even tell me that they have changed their life. Can you imagine that? I can't even tell you how grateful and astounded I am when I get that kind of message."
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"I'm just here, sitting alone in front of my computer, drawing cartoons and sending them out in the cyberspace, and suddenly they come back to me filled with such amazing positivity, and even love. It's the kind of thing that makes you feel useful in life, even if it's just through little comics. It's literally priceless to me."
"The result is that I always create my comics with my followers in mind. I genuinely care about them, as I sometimes feel they care about me. So I'm careful, and I create things that I think will do some good, either by making them laugh, providing a little relief in their day, or make them think a bit, or feel less alone."
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When I asked Tall N Curly what advice she could give to her high school self and other girls who are now where she once was, she said, "I would tell them to focus on themselves. It's very hard when you're young, not to listen to what other people say about you. It's very hard not to get hurt when you feel like you're not accepted for who you are. But what I would like them to keep in a little corner of their head, like some kind of amulet to hold close to their heart when they feel lonely or unhappy, is that time is their best ally."
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"If they can, against all the odds, use their time to become the best version of themselves starting right now, it will help them get through that period of time. If they use this time to nourish their minds, bodies, and souls, by reading, by learning things, by being curious, by doing sports, and making their bodies an ally, they will become strong without realizing it. That way, when the time comes, as they enter adulthood, they will be self-confident, and ready to enjoy themselves and their lives, without having to wait another 20 years to get there."
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"If you weren't born self-confident, you don't wake up one morning and decide that from now on, you are. Self-confidence is something you build over the years. So the sooner they treat themselves as their best friend - even if it's the only one they have at times - the sooner they will become strong and wise, and the sooner they will be able to find their happiness in life. I would say: "Girls, stay strong, stay focused, and be patient."
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Although her cartoons are famous all over the internet, she informs me that "the funny thing is, most of the people I know don't know that I run Tall N Curly. It's my little secret. I regularly see my comics being shared on social media by friends, friends of friends, friends of family… and they don't know it's me. The people who know about it love what I do and encourage me all the time to push things further. That's what I'm about to do."
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So, what are the next steps for Tall N Curly and her art? "I finished a novel two years ago that I would really love to publish. If I don't find a publishing house, I'll publish it myself, as I did with my children's novel Asha and the Spiritz in 2016. I'm used to getting things done by myself anyway. I'm also working on two illustrated books and on a new webcomic that I can't wait to put out there. As for Tall N Curly, I'm thinking about creating something around it, but it's too early to say anything, it's still growing in my mind."
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Like what you see? Find more hilarious women's memes and crazy stories on our Instagram @Cheezcake_Humor and more videos on our TikTok @cheezcaked
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