“This is who I am. I’m different. And I’ve learned to accept it. Fully.”
Meet Hanaam Kaur. She’s a 23 years old, a teacher’s assistant, a Sikh and she lives in the UK.
Oh yeah, and she has a beard:
Hanaam has PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) which causes her excessive hair growth. She noticed that hair began to grow on her face and chest when she was about 11-years-old:
Initially, she tried everything she could to get rid of the hair. She would wax it, pluck it and shave it, but nothing she did could fully hide it. She began getting horrifically bullied in school and even found herself receiving death threats. Things got so bad for Hanaam, she began self harming and considered suicide.
“It got so bad that I just didn’t want to live anymore,” she says.
But all that changed when she turned 16 and decided to be baptised as a Sikh, a religion where it is forbidden to cut body hair. “We need to keep our bodies intact,” she says. “The way it was given by god.”