Alopecia update

The good news is I don’t have anything newsworthy to report. The thinning has slowed down. Upon close inspection (which I hardly ever do anymore) the sparse sections of hair still growing on the sides of my head are holding. The person who cuts my hair says it’s not thinner than it was a year ago. And, I still have plenty of hair on the top of my head. It has become thinner, but not too thin. All of the tension and worries I was carrying when alopecia was first diagnosed, has dropped away. Bald or with hair, doesn’t matter anymore nearly as much as I first thought it would matter. I’ve bought a few new pair of great earrings. Let the focus be on my ears, not my head. 

Although nothing is guaranteed, the type of alopecia I appear to have developed means that my hair won’t likely grow back in the already thinning areas, but I also do not have a variety that usually leads to complete balding. My once thick hair is thinner, and it's beautiful thin hair. The top layer is plentiful enough and my talented hair stylist knows how to cut it in a way that covers the sparse sides. And, I’ve discovered that I love having short hair. I would not go back to long hair even if I could. I also love the fact that I no longer need to shave my legs or armpits. But I do miss my eyebrows!
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. 

University of Nebraska Press | Barns & Noble| Bookshop & IndieBound | Amazon

“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