What Comes Next and How to Like It?

Alopecia. There, now that I’ve said it, it feels better, just get it out of the way. But I did not plan to do a reveal right now. Not yet, it seemed too soon, since I still have plenty of hair.  I figured later, if, or when, it became obvious I’d stand up in sisterhood with all women with Alopecia, and share my experience openly. As an essayist and memoirist, that’s what I do. I write about crucial stretches within my life. 

What I have appear to have going on is Ophiasis Alopecia, affecting the sides above my ears, with a snake like pattern of hair loss across the back of my head. Currently I still have plenty of hair. But who knows what the future holds.
 
It’s been coming on slowly for a while now, and until recently wasn’t all that noticeable.
 
What Comes Next and How to Like It? 

What to do? Get a couple of inches trimmed off. We decide on shoulder length. This way I can gradually deal with my hair loss. But she got my shoulders mixed up with my chin, and without saying anything to me, no warning, gave me a chin length bob. Which would be perfectly fine, if I wanted to get a bob. And if I wasn’t dealing with Alopecia, which is the only reason I wanted to go shorter in the first place. 

The unexpected hair cut would also be fine if she had given me a great cut. But she did not. Mid-cutting, she admitted to having trouble with the cut. She could not get the left side to match the right. And right now I have crooked hair that I can’t pull back and get it off my face. I will need to find someone to fix it. Shape it. And the length is awkward, I want to go shorter. 

In some ways I’m glad this unfortunate haircut has forced me to be open about Alopecia and  hair loss. Most likely I would have needed to go short within the next year, and I would have shared openly then. Instead, I’ve been invited to take the journey now.

Meanwhile, peaceful redwoods are holding me. 

Copyright Terra Trevor 2015-2026
Theme: ,
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard


We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty. 

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something. 

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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence

 "Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education