What it's like to have prosopagnosia

I have prosopagnosia (non-syndromic - I've always been like this, I didn't have a brain injury), which means I don't recognize people by their faces. 25 years of living in society has gotten me pretty decent at picking up non-facial clues - I usually base my recognition of a person on hair/clothing/hopefully some very specific facial feature like a chipped tooth or a broken nose - but I can still be thrown off. For example, at one point my boyfriend got a new job that had a no-facial-hair dress code. So he had to shave off the goatee he'd had for as long as we'd known each other. When he came out of the bathroom without the goatee I discovered that that goatee was one of the major visual markers for me to identify him - so without it, there was a completely unrecognizable stranger talking with my boyfriend's voice standing in my living room. It was terrifying and disturbing, and I didn't get used to it and learn a new way to identify him for several days. (I've also had to have him identify my own mother in photographs for me, when there's been group shots that include more than one woman with short brown hair.)

So everyone I know could get their faces replaced and I would never know.