Marco Van Dijk was four years old when he noticed his first vitiligo patch. He recalls his first encounter with vitiligo: “I was biking on camping, and then I fell off my bike. When the small wounds healed, my original brown skin color didn’t come back. Where I fell, the spots turned white on my knees and elbows.”
At the age of 12, these white spots started getting bigger and soon covered Marco’s whole body. When he turned 25, he was totally depigmented. “This was a particularly difficult time as I needed to deal with the fact that my whole skin color was gone. Now in the summer times, I only get a few brown freckles, which disappear in winters,” Marco shares some details.
It is natural for any teenager to struggle with vitiligo. So, Marco wasn’t an exception. “I think it was more difficult for me as a teen. That was the time when my body and face looked both brown and white. I remember once I heard a voice within me that confronted all negative thoughts. It said – it’s going to be all right. Of course, I didn’t want vitiligo, but, from this point, I was content with the fact that I was healthy and happy, with friends around me,” the 34-year-old police officer shares heartwarming details.
Today, it doesn’t matter to Marco how he looks. What matters to him the most is what kind of person he is now. The religion has helped Marco introspect during the tough time. He has been going to the church for the last nine months now. And, bible lessons have been helping him get closer to god. “Now, I am happy that I experienced vitiligo. Because, it gave me courage, power, and human knowledge. It made me observe how people react when someone looks a bit different. It really made me the person I am now, who I think is a person with a good heart,” Marco pours his heart out.
Marco lives in the Netherlands, where people can be quite upfront. So, he often gets questions directed towards his skin. “Because I am fully depigmented now due to universal vitiligo, it is strange that people could never imagine that I was brown before. That’s kind of funny when I show them pictures from my younger age,” Marco likes to keep things light.
“Are you undergoing any treatment?” We asked Marco; he replied: “When I was younger, I used to go to the hospital three times a week for sun tanning. But it didn’t work for me. I had laser treatment, light treatment, and skin transplantation. At one point, I stopped because I didn’t want any of this.”
When we asked Marco to leave us with a message for fellow vitiligo fighters, he indeed had something special to share: “I’ve heard a lot of people with vitiligo don’t want to go outside because they are ashamed of themselves. That hurts me. Everyone has something special. Some of it is physical while some remains inside. Love yourself for who you are.”
We wish Marco all the best for future. We are proud to designate him a Vitiligo Crusader title.