"I'm raising money for childhood cancer research! Did you know that kids' cancers are different from adult cancers? It's true. And childhood cancer research is extremely underfunded. So I decided to do something about it by raising money for cures.

Now I need your help! Will you make a donation? Every dollar makes a difference for the thousands of infants, children, teens, and young adults fighting childhood cancers."

^^^ I'll leave that there, since it's a good summary of what I'm trying to do here. However, I wasn't touched by childhood cancer until I got to college. As a child, I lost both my dance teacher of ten plus years and my grandfather to cancer. Now, as a young adult, my mother is fighting for her life against oral cancer. She falls into the 7% of people who get this kind of cancer without any risk factors being in place. She never drank excessively, never smoked, never partook in any kind of tobacco... and yet here she is; the strongest woman I know at the weakest physical point in her life. She threatened to shoot me if I shaved my head for her so I'm aiming to do the next best thing. This will be my third time donating my hair. It's really the least I can do. But I'm getting off track. Childhood cancer... now that's a whole different demon. I could go on about how "they haven't gotten to live their life" and "they're too young to understand" and "they don't deserve this pain"... but doesn't that apply to every cancer patient? If that's the case... why is it that we feel worse when a child is the one afflicted BUT they aren't even close to having the amount of funding they need to find a cure? As I said before, cancer had thrust its way into my life multiple times before, but I hadn't had to hear it from a child's perspective until this past year (August 2013-now). When I began to tell people about my mother having cancer (I try to avoid it as the ensuing pitying looks tend to annoy me) I found one friend who could relate to me. That would be Kayla, one of the other two Hairless Potters. I don't know if she covered it in her bio (or if she even wrote one) but both Kayla's mother and brother have battled cancer. Now the mother thing I could relate to, but the brother... I can't even imagine how hard it would be to hold myself together if my little brother were stricken with this demon, too. The one time I met him, he lived up to the glowing praises that Kayla had given him: intelligent, witty, talented, and just an all-around endearing individual. He was in no way what one who has never been exposed to cancer would expect a child who had seen what he had seen to be. My other exposure to childhood cancer came in the form of a script that was e-mailed to me in October of 2013. It was being proposed as a show at my college and I was given the chance to read it and then meet with the playwright. The play itself was about pediatric cancer and what it's like from the perspective of the patient but also offers a resounding and heartbreaking look at what it does to everyone else in the end. I fell in love with its witticisms and sarcasm and love-hate characters and knew I had to be involved in this show in some way. When I met with the playwright, I learned that she was a pediatric cancer survivor herself and that much of the play was taken right from her own experiences, from the interactions to the pass times to the internal conflict. Never have I been exposed to a more raw and eye-opening look into what it's like being forced to grow up before your body squashes your soul. Every night that I worked as a crew member for the show, I cried. It never stopped getting to me. Certain lines resonated with me as the child of a cancer patient. One scene in particular shines light on the never-ending fear that there's no guarantee that the cancer is gone for good, even when "treated"...and that it won't come back more aggressively. However... if we found a cure for pediatric cancer, we could forget that fear entirely. Imagine the fifty, sixty, seventy plus years that these children could have without a fear of falling back into the dark and confusing days in the hospital. That's why I'm cutting my hair. That's why I'm sitting here writing this essay and praying that you've read this far. If you have, thank you from the bottom of my heart. It means a lot that you care enough about this cause and enough about what I have to say about it to stare at your screen for this long. Now I must ask a favor of you. The purpose of me getting my hair cut is for people to fund me to do so. However, no matter how much I fundraise, I will still get my hair cut and donated to those who need it more than I do...but that's all that will happen. No strides will be made towards curing children of cancer. I've set myself a goal of $200 and I'm praying that I can reach it. If all of my Facebook friends donated just $1, I could double my goal. So I'm asking you, reader... whether you know me or my family or my teammates or not... please, consider donating to this cause. Every little bit helps, and I type that with absolute sincerity. I can prattle on and use pretty words all day and night until the 27th but that won't heal anyone. That's up to you. I truly hope that you will support me and my teammates (one of whom is actually getting her head shaved!) in our pursuit of a brighter future for those we hold dear and for the generations to come. Thank you and God bless <3