Deborah Kilmer

Over the past couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection, counseling, and “shadow work” to better understand how my mind works, especially after some major life changes and losses. As part of that process, I started talking more openly about how I think, remember, imagine, and experience things internally, both in therapy and through a lot of personal writing and online discussion. As I kept describing the way my inner world works; how I visualize, how I process memories, how I experience sensory and emotional imagery. People and resources kept pointing me toward things related to mental imagery and visualization. After a few months of that, I was directed to information about aphantasia (and the imagery spectrum more broadly), and when I looked into it, it immediately resonated with how I’ve always experienced my own mind. That was the first time I realized there was actually a name and a framework for something I had always assumed was just how everyone thought.