"You can't even see it", the line you get when you first tell people about your alopecia. My mum first noticed my bald spot on my head, she didn't want to tell me at first due to my hair being my favorite thing about me. She worked up the courage over a week to tell me, I remember exactly what had happened in the moments leading up to this. I'd just finished work, mum was cooking tea in the kitchen and I was brushing my hair getting ready for a shower. A few weeks before I had asked my mum if the amount of hair coming out in the shower was normal. Being from a family who all have really long and thick hair to my mum this was normal. It all started making sense once she had told me about the patch which was only the size of a £2 coin. It wasn't normal at all. Far from it. I was losing my hair. Nothing seemed more devastating to me than this. I felt like my whole world had ended. I visited the doctors the next day and they advised me I had alopecia areata. Hearing the word alopecia crushed me. I thought every hair on my body was going to fall out. Little did I know that there were many types of alopecia and after some research, I was still slowly dying inside. I told my family I needed wigs and I was going to shave all my hair off. I see now I was being very dramatic. The doctor did further tests on me and it turns out my alopecia is linked to my under active thyroid. I was put on medication to see if this would work balance my thyroid out. Over the coming weeks I was so tired from worry, stress and what people would think when they saw this. Little did I know they couldn't see it unless I showed them myself. My tablets were upped to a higher dose as they weren't working and from there things seemed to get a little better. Over the coming months the hair folicles started growing again. With the advice from the doctor to use baby shampoo and nothing with harsh chemicals on my hair, and to use a steroid cream things started looking up. Then I became obsessed with taking pictures of my alopecia and I knew it was getting worse but no one would listen to me. No one seemed to understand what I was going through. Soon I put it to the back of my mind and started university and moved out of my parents house. This is when my alopecia seemed to get worse. I was low, my depression seemed to take over and my immune system started to shut down. My alopecia moved around from the left side of my head to the middle and right side of my head. Today my hair is slowly growing back on the right side but not so much on the left. I have come to peace with my alopecia after seeing various blog posts and meeting different people with alopecia areata. I realised life isn't all about your hair and i can still be beautiful inside and out regardless of whether my body wants to fight itself or not. There's more to life than hair.