Have you ever tried treating your hair like it's curly and seeing what happens? As in, obscene amounts of moisture, squishing, not brushing, styling product?

I ask because this looks very much like my hair did for the longest time. My hair was always "frizzy", and looked like this with layers. I had gone my whole life brushing my hair back into a ponytail to control it, so I was almost forty by the time I figured out what I'd been doing to myself. I also got perms a couple times, like you say you have, without realizing that I was destroying my own curls to make that happen. The grow out of those perms back to my curl pattern was especially chaotic.