Throughout my boyhood, I had a protruding brown mole positioned beneath my nose.

It was -- as anyone who has endured the junior high cafeteria can imagine -- a source of great embarrassment. I attempted to conceal it with my wisp of a mustache; posed for pictures with my head tilted toward the left; shied away from girls, who would surely take one look at my impairment and retch in disgust. "Mark!" my brother called me -- a taunt that cut significantly deeper than the actual mole itself.

"Mark! Mark! Mark!"

It wasn't until early adulthood, when I had the opportunity to interview some of the rich and famous among us, that I realized I was far from alone. Rich Gannon had "marks." Tate George had "marks."

Lenny Dykstra had "marks." Why, even Katarina Witt (hubba) and Molly Sims (hubba) had "marks."

This, oddly, is what I thought of the other day, as I spent 45 minutes on the phone with Herschel Walker, the former NFL star whose new autobiography, "Breaking Free," details his lifelong struggle with dissociative identity disorder. In the two weeks since his book was released, Walker has repeatedly detailed the intricacies of DID, a condition in which a single person displays multiple distinct identities or personalities, each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the environment. Ad nauseam, Walker has spoken about the time he played Russian roulette with a loaded gun; about the time he nearly killed his wife; about myriad individuals taking up space within his body.

"It's been a horrible struggle, because as an athlete I've always been taught not to use excuses in my life," Walker said. "You're supposed to be strong about things, to internalize. So all this was going on, and I felt like I had to hide it." For years, Walker kept a diary of his DID experiences. It was a form of therapy that, he said, "enabled me to understand what I was going through. I was writing to help myself." Once, in an act that was completely out of character for the shy 46-year-old, Walker let a friend read his etchings. "This," he was told, "could be a great book."

Walker trimmed down his more than 1,500 notebook pages into the 238-page edition now available from Simon & Schuster. The book is truly revelatory -- a welcome departure from the typical in-the-fourth-quarter-I-took-the-handoff-and … literary spewings we've grown numb to.

"I suppose I could have written about my football career, but that didn't interest me," he said. "I know there are thousands upon thousands of people struggling with DID. Maybe by coming out I can help raise awareness and make people feel like they're not alone."

Though Walker initially envisioned the reach of "Breaking Free" as confined to those with DID, there's a potentially greater impact. With increasing intensity, Americans are brainwashed to believe that our famous heroes -- be they athletes or actors, singers or dancers or models -- are flawless humanoids able to soar to unparalleled heights atop the wings of an almost Christ-like infallibility. We lean against rails to have Derek Jeter scribble his name on a piece of paper; scream at the top of our lungs if Nelly Furtado so much as sweats in our direction; swoon helplessly at the sight of Eva Longoria or Taye Diggs. We think, "Boy, I wish I could be just like him … wish I could have that life."

Magazines airbrush any bodily blemishes, lest we be turned off by an unsightly zit. Yet beneath the fancy clothes and paparazzi flashes, celebrities are mere people, cursed with the same warts and pimples and "marks" as the rest of us (as someone who once interviewed Lou Piniella while he simultaneously urinated, smoked a cigarette and ate a ham-and-Swiss hoagie, I assure you this is true).

They fart. They burp. They eat onions and wind up with rank breath.

"We're all human," Walker said. "I wish more people would feel comfortable showing their vulnerabilities. It would do so much good.

Maybe that's a lesson here -- that it's OK to have a weakness, and that you won't kill yourself by revealing it."

With any luck, "Breaking Free" will kick off a movement. At long last, the world's athletes-in-hiding -- from those suffering from emotional or physical abuse to AIDS to erectile dysfunction to DID -- will stand together and scream, "We're not perfect -- so friggin' what!" Fans finally will take pride in their own lives, in their own jobs, without looking enviously toward the few fortunate souls who are paid to play games in souped-up pajamas. There will no longer be a need for our heroes to keep secrets because, well, we're all flawed.

Finally, men like Herschel Walker will come clean without trepidation. Finally, we'll see everybody's marks.

Jeff Pearlman is a former Sports Illustrated senior writer and the author of "Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero," now available in paperback. You can reach him at anngold22@gmail.com.