Friends Look Like Strangers To Me

Carly Steel suffers from face blindness, a rare condition that means she can’t recognise faces, even of those closest to her

- Kate Graham

‘‘He said my name. It was as if his face changed before my eyes

It was a trip to the supermarket in December 2016 that proved to be the final straw. Carly Steel was getting on with her shopping when a man began pushing his trolley into hers.

“It was incredibly annoying,” says Carly, 41. “He kept saying, ‘It’s me’, over and over, but he was a complete stranger.

“Then he said my name and it was as if his face changed before my eyes. I suddenly recognised him. He was a friend I’d known 15 years. I was mortified.”

While most people know that feeling of panic when someone starts talking and you have no idea who they are, this has been Carly’s life for as long as she can remember. She has prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness.

But until that fateful supermarket trip, she had no idea how serious it was.

“By my early 20s I’d just accepted I was terrible at remembering faces,” says Carly, a network marketer and mum of one from Crawley, West Sussex.

“People would tell my friends I’d blanked them on the street or ignored them on a night out.