SHARING OUR
Experiences
This summer, Enable sat down with Chrissie, who is 59, and David, who is 14. Both Chrissie and David have a visible difference and despite growing up in different times, the stigma they have faced is similar. Here, they both share their experiences and the questions and advice that they have for each other
EXPERIENCE When Christine, who goes by Chrissie, was three, she was in an accident that left her with third degree burns on her face, arms, body and thighs. Growing up with her four siblings and in nursery, Chrissie didn’t feel like she was treated differently, but everything changed when she started school. “As I grew older I realised children would treat me differently and I didn’t know why because my family didn’t treat me differently so why would other people?” asks Chrissie. “Once I was at school I started to get bullied and the name calling started.”
Chrissie
David, who has the skin condition bullous ichthyosiform erythroderma, had a similar experience when he made the transition from nursery to school. “It’s quite rubbish really, I have to wake up every morning and put cream on, I’ve got blisters that always come open and I can’t walk around that much,” shares David. “I can’t enjoy things like playing football, riding my bike or going out with my friends most of the time because they all like doing active things and I just have to sit on the side. “It was kind of the same for me at nursery, everyone would just play and it was nothing different, but as soon as
I got into primary school people treated me differently.” People avoided David and treated him like his skin condition was contagious. Eventually he stopped going to school. “I only had one or two people I was friends with and even then, they still didn’t really talk to me because everyone else would think ‘why are they talking to the weird person?’,” admits David. “No one wanted to speak to me and I was really just alone.”
CONFIDENCE These experiences were detrimental to David’s confidence, but things started to change when his teachers stepped in. “I took a break from school and the teachers actually had an assembly with everyone in my year,” reveals David. “They showed them my creams and bandages and let them smell them and feel them, after that they accepted me. Since then I’ve got a lot of friends.” As David approached the end of primary school, he started to worry
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