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For a long time, this story stayed private.

Not because it was unfinished — but because I didn’t yet know how to share it without turning it into something it wasn’t meant to be. I also knew there would be an intuitive understanding inside me when the time was right.

I grew up with a facial port-wine stain birthmark — a visible difference I carried into every room. Like many people who carry something they didn’t choose, I spent years organising my life around how I might be seen — and how to manage the uncertainty that came with that.

When I was young, there was no way to hear from someone further down the road. No place to ask the questions that mattered most. No examples of what it could look like to grow older, form relationships, build confidence, or simply live an ordinary life with something visibly different.

So I carried those questions alone.

Through some of the toughest years — being bullied, learning lessons the hard way, and feeling so vulnerable and scared that I would never make it through life — I guess you just put one foot in front of the other and try not to bring attention to yourself.

Over time — through living, travelling, relationships, and long stretches of self-doubt — some of those questions slowly found answers. Not particularly neat ones. Not ones that solved everything. But real ones, shaped by experience rather than reassurance.

And oh my god — didn’t having a birthmark open my mind up to a deeper understanding of how we exist with one another. It would be hard now, at this point, to say it wasn’t a gift.

This book, and the work growing around it, came from a simple realisation: while there is plenty of information about what visible differences are, there is very little about what it’s actually like to live with one.

How it shapes identity.
How it affects confidence.
How it changes the way you move through the world.

I’m sharing this now because the internet has changed what’s possible. There are ways to reach people that didn’t exist when I was young — and the loneliness I felt, the desire to talk to another person who had a birthmark like me, to connect.

This isn’t about offering answers for everyone. It’s about sharing lived experience, honestly and without polish, for anyone who might be asking the same questions I once was.

The book is one part of that.
This site is another.

This is the beginning — or at least the first time I’m saying it out loud.

— KN