In Richfield, a small town, there was a girl who played basketball.
At the end of each game, the teams lined up and high-fived: “good game”, “good game”. And in that line, some girls on the other team pulled their hands away. They didn’t want to touch hers.
She was born with a giant congenital melanocytic nevus, a birthmark that occurs once in every 500.000 births. It starts just above her knees, goes up her back, and stops below her navel, as if she were wearing a swimsuit. Almost half her body is covered by one enormous mole. And at least 80 % of her skin has marks.
Her mother told her they were “angel kisses”.
In her town, almost no one said anything, because they had grown up together. Outside, it was different. One day, on the school bus, she stood up for another child who was being bullied. One of the boys called her an “ugly, spotted dog”. They made him apologize. But the apology didn’t erase how she felt.
At 8, she started noticing the stares. At 12, the stares started to hurt. Anxiety and depression set in. To this day, she finds it hard to enter a restaurant she doesn’t know.
In high school, she had to choose a topic for her graduation project. She chose her own: neurocutaneous melanosis, another condition she carries within her. Ten pages written and a presentation later, something had changed.
One day she posted a photo in a bikini, from the front and back, hiding nothing.
“I was born to stand out.”
What others called a defect, she turned into her way of being in the world.
