I’m Mary and I have a haemangioma on the left side of my face. A haemangioma is caused by a group of blood vessels forming a lump under the skin.
I have spent my whole life hiding my visible difference with my hair. Strong winds have not been my friend!
The thought of people staring or commenting has always hugely bothered me. I’ve gone to extreme lengths to hide my haemangioma, for example when I was a teenager, I once skipped a school performance I was part of, because I was so worried I would be asked to tie my hair off my face.
When my daughter was five years old, a fellow classmate asked what was wrong with her mummy’s face. She had not been aware of my visible difference before and this led to her constantly telling me: “Your hair has blown off your face, mummy. People are staring!” Of course, this was meant entirely innocently, but it made me even more aware of my appearance.
However, I’ve not let my visible difference hold me back in my career. I’ve worked as a senior lecturer in both university and further education colleges and always had public facing roles. I found young people more concerned with their own growth and development than my difference!
We all need to learn to value ourselves and our unique gifts.
Recently, I discovered Changing Faces. Hiding a visible difference can be exhausting, and I decided I wanted to try and improve my confidence and self-acceptance. Counselling felt like the right path for me, and I had 12 counselling sessions working with an amazing practitioner.
For the first time in about 50 years, I learned to laugh at my camouflage techniques! I learned that other people’s curiosity is quite natural and unlikely to be malicious. This has had a huge effect on my confidence. I have stopped checking my appearance in shops with mirrors and I even joined a new ballet class – not once did I think about my face during it. Changing Faces’ counselling service has been life changing and I am so glad I did it.
I would recommend that anyone with a visible difference takes the time to examine their own feelings and assess their coping strategies, because they aren’t always serving us positively. More importantly, we all need to learn to value ourselves and our unique gifts.
I spent my career feeling less than my symmetrically faced colleagues. Now I finally feel that I am anyone’s equal. I really hope that everyone with a visible difference can access the support they need to value their own worth.
