A Personal Struggle - Alopecia

Written by Rose/Jace, May 12th, 2025

As some of you may already know, Jace has been battling Alopecia for nearly a year and a half. It's been a challenging journey as he struggles to accept his hair loss and gain confidence in who he is. As of January, he has completely lost all the hair on his head. We've had MANY conversations about how our appearance doesn't change who we are, or how our identity is truly found in Christ - nothing else. It's been a good lesson for me to learn as well, as a mother's heart is often broken by the things that break that of our child's heart.

Although this post has nothing to do with our ministry in Mexico, since many of you have asked about his hair loss or others haven't seen him without his hair, I thought it might interest you to know a bit more Alopecia and his journey. As part of a homeschool assignment, I recently asked Jace to write an essay on alopecia, including a bit about his own personal alopecia experience. Here it is.

Alopecia Essay

Do you want to hear some amazing things about alopecia? In this essay I will not only be telling you about alopecia, but what causes it, who gets it, including my alopecia story and more! If you want to learn about alopecia this is the essay for you! So read on!

You are probably wondering even what alopecia is. Alopecia just simply means hair loss. But there are many different kinds of alopecia each causing different kinds of hair loss around the human body. There are five different kinds of alopecia. There is alopecia areata, there is alopecia barbae, there’s alopecia totalis, alopecia universalis and ophiasis alopecia. All of these different varieties of hair loss are all caused by the same thing.

Alopecia is caused when the immune system attacks your own hair follicles leading to hair loss. The hair falls out in random patches (or all the hair falls out) and can happen on any place of the body. Scientists still don’t know why it happens or why it just naturally happens on different people but they are still researching about it.

Alopecia is extremely rare! Only two percent of the entire world has it, or in other words, only about 160 million people. The three main alopecia risk factors are: family

history of alopecia, having autoimmune diseases in the past, and emotional stress and illness in some cases.

I got diagnosed with alopecia when I was seven years old and I still have it right now. It started with small patches on the head that got bigger. Me and my family have been trying different lotions and oils since 2023 in January (when I got it ). But nothing could stop my hair from falling out. I would go to school and people would make fun of me and it really hurt my feelings and I didn’t really want to go to school. Then in June and July it grew back, but then it was January and it started falling out again. In August we went to Mexico and it got more and more challenging each day and all my hair fell out and now I have alopecia totalis. I trusted God more and more each day and now I feel better here in Mexico where we can share the gospel with the Tarahumaras (OAKS OF RIGHTEUOSSNESS), in Mexico.

In conclusion, as you can see in my essay, alopecia is very rare and very discouraging for someone who has it. I also hope you never get it!

- JACE FRIESEN 5/9/2025