Clare Bowen, an actress on ABC's Nashville, recently cut off all of her hair and made a touching Facebook post that took some by surprise.
Bowen posted a photo of herself with a new pixie haircut with the caption "It's just hair" underneath. Bowen went on to describe why she had felt compelled to cut off her formerly long locks.
"Wanna know why I cut it all off?" Bowen asks in her Facebook post.
"When I was four years old, I asked my mother; 'Are there heaters in Heaven?'" she writes. "I had just been diagnosed with end stage nephroblastoma, after several visits to a GP who denied anything was wrong and dubbed my parents 'paranoid.' I'd overheard the doctors telling my family that the only hope of saving me, was an experimental treatment that might kill me anyway. But without it I had maybe two weeks left. The hospital was cold. I'd never felt air conditioning before."
Bowen describes how living in the hospital made her very isolated, and how she only saw other children who were just like her. "We were all together, so no one's appearance came into question. No one got laughed at or teased. We were all we knew."
But things changed when Bowen got out into the real world. "I got really lucky. I survived, my hair grew back and I got strong again. I look relatively normal on the outside, but on the inside, I am still the same stitched back together little creature, in a world where people are judged so harshly for the way they look. It has always been completely incomprehensible to me. How can people think there's time for that?"
"I was really inspired when I heard a story about a little girl who said she couldn't be a princess because she didn't have long hair," Bowen writes. "I wanted her, and others like her to know that's not what makes a princess, or a warrior, or a superhero. It's not what makes you beautiful either. It's your insides that count… even if you happen to be missing half of them."
"Every scar tells a story, every bald head, every dark circle, every prosthetic limb, and every reflection in a mirror that you might not recognize anymore. Look deeper than skin, hair, nails, and lips. You are who you are in your bones. That is where you have the potential to shine the brightest from. It is where your true beautiful self lives."
Bowen's photo prompted an incredible response, and soon people were responding with their own photos and stories, affirming to Bowen that her inspirational and supportive words were sorely needed.
"If it makes even one person think twice about judging another, then in some small way, the world is better," Bowen writes at the end of her emotional post. "Self-esteem takes a lot longer to grow back than hair."
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