Gillian Kgotla was 12 years old and had a perfectly symmetrical face when she developed ringworm under her left eye.
The creams didn’t work. Her eye became red and swollen, and her face began to disintegrate: one day her eye would shrink, the next her nose, then her cheek. At school, her friends asked her what was wrong, and she had no answers. Over the years, she lost her hair, some teeth, and soft tissue. In Botswana, her native country, she came to hate her reflection. A child called her “half-face”. She fought back with books: she studied until she was top of her class and learned to love herself.
She went 18 years without a diagnosis, until a young man on TikTok talked about Parry-Romberg syndrome and she knew instantly. Today, at 29 and living in Sussex, she can’t open her mouth more than 2 centimeters. She eats “like a lady”, she says, and dreams of having surgery just to bite into a hamburger. “Beauty is a feeling, not a matter of appearance”.
