I can't believe I'm reading this...your words are exactly what it's like to experience life coming from the opposite direction (always having aphantasia) and then finding out you have it, and then trying to relearn how to perceive the world as the other 98% of people do. Your second paragraph especially..."usually replaying a skill or learned task in my mind until I had it locked away" OMG I WISH...but now that I know people do things like that I can perceive everything more consistent with everyone else. And I am screenshooting this and showing it to people because people do not take me seriously or understand the gravity because it's hard to explain something to people when the thing you're trying to explain to them is something they, as you said, "take for granted" or almost instinctively/automatically do. When I do get someone to listen and discuss this with they can't figure out how I've been able to do anything in life because mental imagery is apparently SUCH a huge part of the human experience...and I didn't know for 40 years! I mean, I couldn't figure out why I didn't understand how a map related to the city I was navigating my whole life...it was as if the map was a completely different thing than the city it represented to me; I have no idea what my mother looks like unless she is in front of me and I don't see my niece's little curls in her hair when I leave her house, as my sister said she does; I've never daydreamed (I always thought "zoning out" was daydreaming), I never dream, I have no nightmares and I have absolutely no imagination...I can conceptualize something I have experienced before, but I cannot EVER come up with something original, like when my niece asks me to "pretend we're in a castle" and I always panicked because I can't do that, to me we are still in the living room, but apparently to her she is all dressed in a gown, coming down a huge staircase, etc...like she actually can SEE that. In the 4 years since I've found out I've had this, not a day has gone by where I don't get surprised by something that I wouldn't have noticed before. I am so sorry for your loss of your mind's eye...and I don't mean to be insensitive by sounding excited about reading about your misfortune...it just reminds me how real this is AND how much it affected the course of my life. Thank you so much for sharing...I hope you get back what you used to have. I'm far too scared to even dabble in "fixing" it because (a) it would be terribly distracting I would assume and (b) if I could close my eyes and be somewhere else or do any of that stuff, I probably wouldn't open them again lol. Cheers!
Ugh, okay, I can only see your responses if I'm not logged in so I'm gna try and respond to you via memory here. I hear you on all fronts in your reply, and I agree with you in a broad sense. I believe that all is not terrible with aphantasia, that we could have worse "conditions" or "unforeseen things that happen to us" and that we have to look at the positive side of this...one hundred I agree. There are courses and articles out there with things like workshops of how to start to visualize things...but I am by no means in a position to try and change the handbook of life I've been "writing" since infancy. I'm scared to death of what would happen if I could conjure things up in my mind...like I said before, I am not entirely sure I'd ever come back to reality if I had a literal "Happy Place" versus my metaphorical one, right? This place SUCKS a lot of the time, especially as you get older. It compounds past bullshit and then increasingly throws more at you. I mean, ultimately and for real, we should get a free pass at Reality for the rest of our lives from non-aphants because we're always stuck here and they can go to their Happy Place or have Calgon take them away. We're always here. And maybe life doesn't even compound on them or maybe life increasingly sucks less for them because they really do get to escape or do get to free themselves from reality for a little while, from meditation to just remembering a funny story and laughing, who knows. All I know is that I don't ever escape, I’ve never been able to really escape...even one vacations I'm still on the same wavelength. I mean, space and time mean so little to me conceptually that I've said for years that when I go somewhere, whether it be flying to see family or simply driving to the grocery store, it feels like the ground is moving underneath me and I'm always in the same place. I'm never moving or going anywhere, even though I physically know I am (Note: I chalked that one up to self-centered sociopathism, also #eyeroll). Further WHY ARE THERE EVEN FUNERAL HOMES IF PEOPLE CAN RE-ENVISION THAT??? That's pretty masochistic if you ask me haha. I think there are 2 or 3 distinct differences between you and I (and this I’ve deduced from our years of knowing one another, lol). First, I think that you have a better understanding what non-aphants can see because you've actually seen it (or actually visualized it, twice I think). So you have a better understanding than I do of what "visualizing images" even is. I know you don't remember it or cannot recall it very well (or at all), but you have previously experienced it. Any attempt by me to "act like I know" or think I can understand their conceptualizations is futile. Secondly, and seemingly somewhat conversely to my first point, it appears that your experience of aphantasia is farther on the dark end of the spectrum than mine...not that there can be much room that way because it's pitch dark to me...like so dark a photograph apparently cannot develop in there HAHA…but your "being in the present" is stronger than mine. I'm having a hard time with the phrase "being in the present" because that was somewhere I was striving to be, somewhere that I have literally always been working on trying to get to not knowing that the present is really all I have, other than memories I can recall (that may or may not even be accurate). I mean from my therapist to my friends and family to clients even, they always are telling me to not overthink and just “be or live in the now”. So I didn't know I already was here this whole time, if I even am. I mean, I understand “out of sight out of mind”, and I don't miss people like other people do, and I have the same experience with death that you do, but I can recall things that I have experienced. They aren't in images, but I remember them however it is I remember them and I reminisce with people about the same past event and it doesn't feel like I remember any less than they do. And every time I see a leaf I don't think of it as the first time I'm seeing a leaf (and I may have desensitized myself to that, because we see so many leaves so many times in our lives), so maybe it is that. I know that I cannot plan and I literally thought "goals" were euphemistic and not something that one really works toward. I am, however, able to somewhat impute myself into a future even IF and only if I have personally experienced that same event in my past...like car crashes...I can foresee me being in a car crash because I have been in car crashes before. The “future” crashes I am foreseeing are almost exactly the same crashes I've been in in the past, just set in the future. And if I wanted to climb Mt. Fuji one day, I could probably envision that because I watch so much geography and nature shit that I can impute that to some extent. I cannot, however, picture myself with a family...I was even engaged once and it was never that real to me. So, I just thought and told everyone "I don't want kids, I don't SEE myself with kids (shocker #eyerollagain)" but that is because I was unable to see it, and that potential missed opportunity makes me sad. (Side note: I have since apologized to my prior boyfriends because "I must have been emotionally distant" and they all, separately, agreed with me with such amazement that those words were even coming out of my mouth like they had been waiting to hear me say it since the day we broke up. I mean JESUS!) Lastly, I think that this is new to you and you're grappling with it and perhaps using positivity to make it tolerable...or you're really at peace with it (and a far better person than I), or it hasn’t changed your life experience and you’re good with it. However, from where I’m standing and if I understand your story correctly, you were LITERALLY diagnosed with seeing hallucinations because you were telling people that you can SEE shit that isn't there JUST LIKE THEY CAN!!! If that doesn't PISS YOU OFF, then teach me whatever it is you got, because that happening to you pisses ME off and I don't even know you. I know it's no one's fault, not even our own, but come on. I can empathize with that so much because had visions came to me suddenly I would be on every rooftop screaming it until they institutionalized me...because I would have thought I was the only one who could do it. Shit, that's kind of what happened when I found out. Which was because I had one of those half-awake, half-asleep dreams once where I saw a vivid purple smoke AND I could manipulate the way it dissipated in the air. The background was still black but the purple was SO vivid and it had lighter densities as it dissipated. I got up SO FAST and RAN to my sister's house to tell her and her man about what I had seen and they looked at me like "aaaannnnddd..."and he said "yeah, I'm looking at it right now...so what happens?" and I just stared at him like "what?" "You just pulled that up as I was telling you the story about my dream and are WAITING FOR MORE like it's ON DEMAND?!?!” And I could see both of their faces and felt their authenticity and how they were seriously waiting for more to that story. I never saw that purple smoke again and nothing that real ever was in my head before or after. Then I broke down about it, but after a few weeks I thought, "Hey, I'm good, I've done well this far, they see shit in their head and I don't, never stopped me from winning before." That was until it did. I wrote WAY more, but it was double what I’ve already written so I’m going to post it as another discussion and call it “How my Aphantasia made me Delusional and Altered the Course of My Life”, so if you want to read it, it’s there. I hope I didn’t offend you in any way in this response. I’m just so shook about all of this and talking about it helps me work through it, so know that I appreciate you. Good luck with everything.
Omg, stop it! This is both the best and saddest post I've ever read. I feeeeelllll this SOOO hard. I've never seen anything, but not knowing that I was missing parts of life that others (like 98% of "others") weren't, I believe at least, caused me to do things in life that now I can see were as "reckless" as everyone always said they were. But with no ability to see myself in a scenario where the consequences ended up baldy caused me, after gaining success and making money, to feel like I was manifesting all that and the universe is abundant and I was, basically, invincible. Which, of course, is not the case. Ignorance is bliss. Clarity sounds great, but isn't ever at first. All those things you said up there, I can "see" myself doing the same EXACT SHIT that situation, even the words you used and how happy you sound like you were. I have known for 18 months or 2 years, and it was only recently that the gravity of decisions I made, while operating under a premise with only partial information available, but I don't know if I want to see in my mind's eye. All of that sounds so beautifully wonderful, but I've already lived a delusional life (or lack of delusions, but I'm sure it looks like delusions to others) and I think I'd get stuck in like my mind where I really can be invincible. Or see a life passed this present moment even. Hmph. Everytime I come on this site and read stuff I get exhilarated and then I get sad. Anyway, thank you so much for sharing. That is real shit you're talking about up there and I feel that. Thank you.
That's how I am, I am thinking I see a glimpse of that person, but if, in fact, I am seeing a glimpse, it goes away immediately and cannot be recalled. I can't even remember with words what I think I saw for that fleeting moment after the initial flash. I answered "1" for that because in my head it is more of an initial firing of neurons when the brain is asked to call something into it and that initial firing creates what we think are images. Other people I've read about say it is an image and answer "2", but to me it's not really an image. Can you recall the shape of her eyes? What does his nose look like? I can tell you my mom is blonde, but, sadly, if she is not in front of my face with my eyes open I really cannot describe her to you at all. It's as if I'm recalling an "aura" of "essence" of that person when I'm recalling them. How about missing people that you're close to. With me, I don't remember how much I missed someone until I see them again in reality or in the physical sense (like FaceTime or whatever). I always felt bad because I never make the first attempt to call people...I always thought that I must think I'm better than them and they have to call me, but now I realize that I don't think of them if I'm not seeing them. My sister's daughter, my niece, is 2 and half years old and when I told my sister I had Aphantasia and explained it to her, she said "You mean, you don't see Skye's face when you leave here and pull out of the driveway?" Nope...and that realization hurt, because it's not just the fact that 97% of the population of the Earth is seeing mental images, but it's not until we start to become aware of the things we don't even know we're missing when the depth of this come to fruition. How nice would it be to even conjure up an image of my niece and her little curls when I'm feeling sad to cheer me up? Anyway, I answered "1" to that...sounds like you're about there also.
This. Is. Genius. Your use of Schrodinger's Cat Analogy to your mother is so far beyond spot-on, I think it's, well, genius! I always wondered why I didn't seem to miss people as much as other people...like, I thought I was sociopathic at some level, like I didn't care about humans as much as others. But when I saw those people that I (thought I) didn't miss that much, it all flooded back into my mind. But take them out of the picture and they are LITERALLY "out of sight, out of mind" (whoever coined that phrase was either aphantasic or didn't really understand the gravity of that sequence of words). When you wrote "When I see my mother, the box opens" I gasped, because that is EXACTLY what my experience throughout life has been like (I also didn't really realize that I can't see the nuances of my mom's face in my head and that makes me a little sad, but I'll always have her aura I guess). But, anyway, thank you for that analogy...I'm totally using it like always!!
Same. Blank pieces of paper are just blank pieces of paper to me...always have been. As time passed I would understand that the blank pieces of paper are not just that, but were more of an infinite array of possibilities. However, though I knew that the possibilities for what this piece of paper could become existed, there was not one of those possibilities that I could see, and thus, create. This always made me feel inadequate, as I always wanted to create (and I still do want to create). I will note that once I see an image and am pretty hardcore good at replicating it, but I cannot manipulate it or change it in any way. So if I am drawing a character - like Hei Hei from Moana - I can draw only what I have seen before (from a static picture online, not even from the Movie), but if you ask me to turn him to the side...crickets. Like, where are those feathers coming from? How bulbous is his body? How far out do those eyes jut out if I'm looking at him from the side? Still crickets. I haven't been in an art class since high school (which was from 1993-1997) so I had to run to like Barnes and Noble before I would have to draw something and look at pictures of whatever it was. Since the internet became a thing, Pinterest has been a modified external Mind's Eye for me, but it's always crickets in my head. Unless you're talking about words...then my head won't shut up lol.
I. Am. Legitimately. Shook. About all of this... I found out about my Aphantasia maybe a year ago. It was a HUGE deal to me, but it didn't seem to be to anyone else (except my therapist, lol), but after a month or two of me incessantly talking about it, I finally took a bite of the "imaginary apple" that is "we, Aphantasics, simply experience life differently". I mean, I had made it this far in my 42 years on this planet, so I thought "it is what it is" and moved on not giving it much thought thereafter. Until now... From the age of 11 (until about a year or two ago) I worked in the legal field along with the mortgage banking industry. They were family businesses, so I started as the copyboy at our Mortgage Company and remained there, increasing my duties, all the way through college, at which point I was managing the Mortgage Company and I had a pretty significant role in our Family's Law Firm. I ultimately became an Attorney (which I never wanted to do, but I could never figure out anything else to do), specializing in Real Estate Transactions, both Residential and Commercial, and my business and I flourished, adding employees, pushing closing after closing and transaction after transaction, exceeding expectation after expectation and winning award after award. I was like a phenom, well respected, and made a TON of money. But I hated it. And after practicing law for 15 years (and working in the same building for 30 of my 42 years in this life) I could no longer take it and pretty abruptly I just quit, let my entire staff go, and burned every bridge I could in the process so I could never go back. Stupid? Perhaps. However, I had to get out. Had I stayed I was going to (a) end up in jail or disbarred (l because I refused to conform, I never fit what the Disciplinary Board of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court deemed to be a "normal" Attorney, and my mouth doesn't stop, especially then, so not was a matter of time before they disbarred me on some technicality, as they were starting to get all over me for things that I couldn't have done wrong)...so, I disbarred myself first lol) or (b) that job was going to kill me medically from a heart attack or something. I was simply PERPETUALLY angry and just a mean person...and the sleep deprivation! There were literally weeks that I worked 100 hours...I documented them, it was pure utter insanity. (I will try and be as concise as possible for the remainder of this, but since adjectives and descriptions are the pictures that I "see" in my head, brevity is not a strong point for me (but at least I know why FINALLY)). Now, as I stated above, I never wanted to be a Lawyer. I had a scholarship to PittLaw but I never showed up my first year. I took a year off and moved to LA to be an actor. That didn't work out so I started at PittLaw the year after Undergrad (they held my scholarship, so that was dope). Then I quit law school after the first semester. Then I tried to go back and quit again. Then I finally went back 2 years later and finished and then came back home to start my Practice. I am telling you all of this for a specific reason. That is because in between all of those times of quitting law school or not even starting law school and all that time that I spent in between my stints in law school I was simply never ever able to find something else to do with my life. It was like I was bred for law and that was it. Like, I'm pretty smart, especially at school, so maybe I'd go back to school...but for what? Or maybe I'll start my own business doing something creative...but what? I further stated earlier that I burned every bridge when I quit my Practice a year and a half ago...why? Because I knew I'd go back like I always did...like the burning of the bridges would FORCE me to find a new career path. But here I sit, all these years later and all those accolades later and all that money is gone, all of my retirement and I might lose my condo now and I still cannot think of what to do next for work. Months and months passed where I was thinking that there is something wrong with my psychologically and of me having to deal with my family all looking at me like I'm crazy and "You have to find a job, Chetty" and I thought the answer would pop up at some time here...but it never did. And then, last week, it dawned on me...I always reverted back to law because I AM UNABLE TO TRAVEL A PATH THAT I HAVE NOT ALREADY EXPERIENCED. In other words, my inability to visual or imagine or whatever hindered my ability to find a career that I actually would have enjoyed. I've always been good at whatever it was that I was doing, but only if there was a syllabus or if the path was laid out for me, as in my family businesses. Take that away and put a fork in the road (which I never knew people could ACTUALLY VISUALIZE) and I'm simply standing at the edge of what is happening in the present moment. I get all of the things and revelations that everyone with Aphantasia talks about...the "oh, you're for real when you visualize stuff...it's not a metaphor or euphemistic". And that was a shock...but no one (that I have seen yet, at least) discusses HOW THEY MAY HAVE DONE THINGS DIFFERENTLY had they known that almost EVERYONE in society experiences life differently than we do. I liken being able to see images and to foretell through visual experiences how certain actions one takes will or could end up as a superpower. Fore, had I been able to FORESEE losing my Condo in a literal sense, maybe I wouldn't have made the decision to quit to abruptly or to burn all the bridges. Don't get me wrong, I KNEW that if I couldn't pay my mortgage I would lose my house...but I had never EXPERIENCED it before so it wasn't that real to me. FURTHER, had I KNOWN that I was going to feel the same way (directionless) still at 42 as I did when I was 18, I wouldn't have done those things or acted (as others would tell me, and which I didn't understand until now) as reckless or cavalier in my decision making. The fact that I couldn't see or imagine other avenues or trajectories for me to travel for a career AND THE FACT THAT OTHERS COULD AND CAN would have changed everything about my life. I have never regretted a moment in my life...I am a poster child for only looking forward and from learning from things in the past, but had I had ANY idea that I was being hindered so intensely with an inability to foresee or imagine or whatever, I would have sought counsel or understood WHY I thought I had to be a lawyer. I mean, I wouldn't have ever even applied to law school in the first place. I felt so dumb for not being able to see another career path. I tried and I tried and I always boomeranged back to law. Now I up that creek...I'll figure it out...I always do, and I'm blessed to see how my Aphantasia affected how the first 42 years of my life panned out...and I'm further blessed for all of the great fortunes I have been given in this life, but my sole purpose for writing this epistle on your page (sorry, this is where this landed haha), is to raise awareness so that other people that experience life the way we do can UNDERSTAND that other people can visualize things they have never experienced. And from that visualization they can make a somewhat "educated" guess as to whether or not they should "decide" to go that route or not. I always thought I just didn't want a family or kids...it never dawned on me that just because I couldn't SEE IT in my future doesn't mean that I necessarily don't want it! I just wasn't able to see all the joy children bring to a parent because I never experienced it. That you for listening or reading if you even made it this far. I'm doing my best to accept this and get passed it, but it's going to take me a minute, but I just don't want someone else to get stuck in a lifelong rut because they didn't realize that other people have something they don't have...a mind's eye. I literally probably would have done everything different had I only known. At least I know now...
I can't believe I'm reading this...your words are exactly what it's like to experience life coming from the opposite direction (always having aphantasia) and then finding out you have it, and then trying to relearn how to perceive the world as the other 98% of people do. Your second paragraph especially..."usually replaying a skill or learned task in my mind until I had it locked away" OMG I WISH...but now that I know people do things like that I can perceive everything more consistent with everyone else. And I am screenshooting this and showing it to people because people do not take me seriously or understand the gravity because it's hard to explain something to people when the thing you're trying to explain to them is something they, as you said, "take for granted" or almost instinctively/automatically do. When I do get someone to listen and discuss this with they can't figure out how I've been able to do anything in life because mental imagery is apparently SUCH a huge part of the human experience...and I didn't know for 40 years! I mean, I couldn't figure out why I didn't understand how a map related to the city I was navigating my whole life...it was as if the map was a completely different thing than the city it represented to me; I have no idea what my mother looks like unless she is in front of me and I don't see my niece's little curls in her hair when I leave her house, as my sister said she does; I've never daydreamed (I always thought "zoning out" was daydreaming), I never dream, I have no nightmares and I have absolutely no imagination...I can conceptualize something I have experienced before, but I cannot EVER come up with something original, like when my niece asks me to "pretend we're in a castle" and I always panicked because I can't do that, to me we are still in the living room, but apparently to her she is all dressed in a gown, coming down a huge staircase, etc...like she actually can SEE that. In the 4 years since I've found out I've had this, not a day has gone by where I don't get surprised by something that I wouldn't have noticed before. I am so sorry for your loss of your mind's eye...and I don't mean to be insensitive by sounding excited about reading about your misfortune...it just reminds me how real this is AND how much it affected the course of my life. Thank you so much for sharing...I hope you get back what you used to have. I'm far too scared to even dabble in "fixing" it because (a) it would be terribly distracting I would assume and (b) if I could close my eyes and be somewhere else or do any of that stuff, I probably wouldn't open them again lol. Cheers!
Ugh, okay, I can only see your responses if I'm not logged in so I'm gna try and respond to you via memory here. I hear you on all fronts in your reply, and I agree with you in a broad sense. I believe that all is not terrible with aphantasia, that we could have worse "conditions" or "unforeseen things that happen to us" and that we have to look at the positive side of this...one hundred I agree. There are courses and articles out there with things like workshops of how to start to visualize things...but I am by no means in a position to try and change the handbook of life I've been "writing" since infancy. I'm scared to death of what would happen if I could conjure things up in my mind...like I said before, I am not entirely sure I'd ever come back to reality if I had a literal "Happy Place" versus my metaphorical one, right? This place SUCKS a lot of the time, especially as you get older. It compounds past bullshit and then increasingly throws more at you. I mean, ultimately and for real, we should get a free pass at Reality for the rest of our lives from non-aphants because we're always stuck here and they can go to their Happy Place or have Calgon take them away. We're always here. And maybe life doesn't even compound on them or maybe life increasingly sucks less for them because they really do get to escape or do get to free themselves from reality for a little while, from meditation to just remembering a funny story and laughing, who knows. All I know is that I don't ever escape, I’ve never been able to really escape...even one vacations I'm still on the same wavelength. I mean, space and time mean so little to me conceptually that I've said for years that when I go somewhere, whether it be flying to see family or simply driving to the grocery store, it feels like the ground is moving underneath me and I'm always in the same place. I'm never moving or going anywhere, even though I physically know I am (Note: I chalked that one up to self-centered sociopathism, also #eyeroll). Further WHY ARE THERE EVEN FUNERAL HOMES IF PEOPLE CAN RE-ENVISION THAT??? That's pretty masochistic if you ask me haha. I think there are 2 or 3 distinct differences between you and I (and this I’ve deduced from our years of knowing one another, lol). First, I think that you have a better understanding what non-aphants can see because you've actually seen it (or actually visualized it, twice I think). So you have a better understanding than I do of what "visualizing images" even is. I know you don't remember it or cannot recall it very well (or at all), but you have previously experienced it. Any attempt by me to "act like I know" or think I can understand their conceptualizations is futile. Secondly, and seemingly somewhat conversely to my first point, it appears that your experience of aphantasia is farther on the dark end of the spectrum than mine...not that there can be much room that way because it's pitch dark to me...like so dark a photograph apparently cannot develop in there HAHA…but your "being in the present" is stronger than mine. I'm having a hard time with the phrase "being in the present" because that was somewhere I was striving to be, somewhere that I have literally always been working on trying to get to not knowing that the present is really all I have, other than memories I can recall (that may or may not even be accurate). I mean from my therapist to my friends and family to clients even, they always are telling me to not overthink and just “be or live in the now”. So I didn't know I already was here this whole time, if I even am. I mean, I understand “out of sight out of mind”, and I don't miss people like other people do, and I have the same experience with death that you do, but I can recall things that I have experienced. They aren't in images, but I remember them however it is I remember them and I reminisce with people about the same past event and it doesn't feel like I remember any less than they do. And every time I see a leaf I don't think of it as the first time I'm seeing a leaf (and I may have desensitized myself to that, because we see so many leaves so many times in our lives), so maybe it is that. I know that I cannot plan and I literally thought "goals" were euphemistic and not something that one really works toward. I am, however, able to somewhat impute myself into a future even IF and only if I have personally experienced that same event in my past...like car crashes...I can foresee me being in a car crash because I have been in car crashes before. The “future” crashes I am foreseeing are almost exactly the same crashes I've been in in the past, just set in the future. And if I wanted to climb Mt. Fuji one day, I could probably envision that because I watch so much geography and nature shit that I can impute that to some extent. I cannot, however, picture myself with a family...I was even engaged once and it was never that real to me. So, I just thought and told everyone "I don't want kids, I don't SEE myself with kids (shocker #eyerollagain)" but that is because I was unable to see it, and that potential missed opportunity makes me sad. (Side note: I have since apologized to my prior boyfriends because "I must have been emotionally distant" and they all, separately, agreed with me with such amazement that those words were even coming out of my mouth like they had been waiting to hear me say it since the day we broke up. I mean JESUS!) Lastly, I think that this is new to you and you're grappling with it and perhaps using positivity to make it tolerable...or you're really at peace with it (and a far better person than I), or it hasn’t changed your life experience and you’re good with it. However, from where I’m standing and if I understand your story correctly, you were LITERALLY diagnosed with seeing hallucinations because you were telling people that you can SEE shit that isn't there JUST LIKE THEY CAN!!! If that doesn't PISS YOU OFF, then teach me whatever it is you got, because that happening to you pisses ME off and I don't even know you. I know it's no one's fault, not even our own, but come on. I can empathize with that so much because had visions came to me suddenly I would be on every rooftop screaming it until they institutionalized me...because I would have thought I was the only one who could do it. Shit, that's kind of what happened when I found out. Which was because I had one of those half-awake, half-asleep dreams once where I saw a vivid purple smoke AND I could manipulate the way it dissipated in the air. The background was still black but the purple was SO vivid and it had lighter densities as it dissipated. I got up SO FAST and RAN to my sister's house to tell her and her man about what I had seen and they looked at me like "aaaannnnddd..."and he said "yeah, I'm looking at it right now...so what happens?" and I just stared at him like "what?" "You just pulled that up as I was telling you the story about my dream and are WAITING FOR MORE like it's ON DEMAND?!?!” And I could see both of their faces and felt their authenticity and how they were seriously waiting for more to that story. I never saw that purple smoke again and nothing that real ever was in my head before or after. Then I broke down about it, but after a few weeks I thought, "Hey, I'm good, I've done well this far, they see shit in their head and I don't, never stopped me from winning before." That was until it did. I wrote WAY more, but it was double what I’ve already written so I’m going to post it as another discussion and call it “How my Aphantasia made me Delusional and Altered the Course of My Life”, so if you want to read it, it’s there. I hope I didn’t offend you in any way in this response. I’m just so shook about all of this and talking about it helps me work through it, so know that I appreciate you. Good luck with everything.
Omg, stop it! This is both the best and saddest post I've ever read. I feeeeelllll this SOOO hard. I've never seen anything, but not knowing that I was missing parts of life that others (like 98% of "others") weren't, I believe at least, caused me to do things in life that now I can see were as "reckless" as everyone always said they were. But with no ability to see myself in a scenario where the consequences ended up baldy caused me, after gaining success and making money, to feel like I was manifesting all that and the universe is abundant and I was, basically, invincible. Which, of course, is not the case. Ignorance is bliss. Clarity sounds great, but isn't ever at first. All those things you said up there, I can "see" myself doing the same EXACT SHIT that situation, even the words you used and how happy you sound like you were. I have known for 18 months or 2 years, and it was only recently that the gravity of decisions I made, while operating under a premise with only partial information available, but I don't know if I want to see in my mind's eye. All of that sounds so beautifully wonderful, but I've already lived a delusional life (or lack of delusions, but I'm sure it looks like delusions to others) and I think I'd get stuck in like my mind where I really can be invincible. Or see a life passed this present moment even. Hmph. Everytime I come on this site and read stuff I get exhilarated and then I get sad. Anyway, thank you so much for sharing. That is real shit you're talking about up there and I feel that. Thank you.
That's how I am, I am thinking I see a glimpse of that person, but if, in fact, I am seeing a glimpse, it goes away immediately and cannot be recalled. I can't even remember with words what I think I saw for that fleeting moment after the initial flash. I answered "1" for that because in my head it is more of an initial firing of neurons when the brain is asked to call something into it and that initial firing creates what we think are images. Other people I've read about say it is an image and answer "2", but to me it's not really an image. Can you recall the shape of her eyes? What does his nose look like? I can tell you my mom is blonde, but, sadly, if she is not in front of my face with my eyes open I really cannot describe her to you at all. It's as if I'm recalling an "aura" of "essence" of that person when I'm recalling them. How about missing people that you're close to. With me, I don't remember how much I missed someone until I see them again in reality or in the physical sense (like FaceTime or whatever). I always felt bad because I never make the first attempt to call people...I always thought that I must think I'm better than them and they have to call me, but now I realize that I don't think of them if I'm not seeing them. My sister's daughter, my niece, is 2 and half years old and when I told my sister I had Aphantasia and explained it to her, she said "You mean, you don't see Skye's face when you leave here and pull out of the driveway?" Nope...and that realization hurt, because it's not just the fact that 97% of the population of the Earth is seeing mental images, but it's not until we start to become aware of the things we don't even know we're missing when the depth of this come to fruition. How nice would it be to even conjure up an image of my niece and her little curls when I'm feeling sad to cheer me up? Anyway, I answered "1" to that...sounds like you're about there also.
This. Is. Genius. Your use of Schrodinger's Cat Analogy to your mother is so far beyond spot-on, I think it's, well, genius! I always wondered why I didn't seem to miss people as much as other people...like, I thought I was sociopathic at some level, like I didn't care about humans as much as others. But when I saw those people that I (thought I) didn't miss that much, it all flooded back into my mind. But take them out of the picture and they are LITERALLY "out of sight, out of mind" (whoever coined that phrase was either aphantasic or didn't really understand the gravity of that sequence of words). When you wrote "When I see my mother, the box opens" I gasped, because that is EXACTLY what my experience throughout life has been like (I also didn't really realize that I can't see the nuances of my mom's face in my head and that makes me a little sad, but I'll always have her aura I guess). But, anyway, thank you for that analogy...I'm totally using it like always!!
Same. Blank pieces of paper are just blank pieces of paper to me...always have been. As time passed I would understand that the blank pieces of paper are not just that, but were more of an infinite array of possibilities. However, though I knew that the possibilities for what this piece of paper could become existed, there was not one of those possibilities that I could see, and thus, create. This always made me feel inadequate, as I always wanted to create (and I still do want to create). I will note that once I see an image and am pretty hardcore good at replicating it, but I cannot manipulate it or change it in any way. So if I am drawing a character - like Hei Hei from Moana - I can draw only what I have seen before (from a static picture online, not even from the Movie), but if you ask me to turn him to the side...crickets. Like, where are those feathers coming from? How bulbous is his body? How far out do those eyes jut out if I'm looking at him from the side? Still crickets. I haven't been in an art class since high school (which was from 1993-1997) so I had to run to like Barnes and Noble before I would have to draw something and look at pictures of whatever it was. Since the internet became a thing, Pinterest has been a modified external Mind's Eye for me, but it's always crickets in my head. Unless you're talking about words...then my head won't shut up lol.
I. Am. Legitimately. Shook. About all of this... I found out about my Aphantasia maybe a year ago. It was a HUGE deal to me, but it didn't seem to be to anyone else (except my therapist, lol), but after a month or two of me incessantly talking about it, I finally took a bite of the "imaginary apple" that is "we, Aphantasics, simply experience life differently". I mean, I had made it this far in my 42 years on this planet, so I thought "it is what it is" and moved on not giving it much thought thereafter. Until now... From the age of 11 (until about a year or two ago) I worked in the legal field along with the mortgage banking industry. They were family businesses, so I started as the copyboy at our Mortgage Company and remained there, increasing my duties, all the way through college, at which point I was managing the Mortgage Company and I had a pretty significant role in our Family's Law Firm. I ultimately became an Attorney (which I never wanted to do, but I could never figure out anything else to do), specializing in Real Estate Transactions, both Residential and Commercial, and my business and I flourished, adding employees, pushing closing after closing and transaction after transaction, exceeding expectation after expectation and winning award after award. I was like a phenom, well respected, and made a TON of money. But I hated it. And after practicing law for 15 years (and working in the same building for 30 of my 42 years in this life) I could no longer take it and pretty abruptly I just quit, let my entire staff go, and burned every bridge I could in the process so I could never go back. Stupid? Perhaps. However, I had to get out. Had I stayed I was going to (a) end up in jail or disbarred (l because I refused to conform, I never fit what the Disciplinary Board of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court deemed to be a "normal" Attorney, and my mouth doesn't stop, especially then, so not was a matter of time before they disbarred me on some technicality, as they were starting to get all over me for things that I couldn't have done wrong)...so, I disbarred myself first lol) or (b) that job was going to kill me medically from a heart attack or something. I was simply PERPETUALLY angry and just a mean person...and the sleep deprivation! There were literally weeks that I worked 100 hours...I documented them, it was pure utter insanity. (I will try and be as concise as possible for the remainder of this, but since adjectives and descriptions are the pictures that I "see" in my head, brevity is not a strong point for me (but at least I know why FINALLY)). Now, as I stated above, I never wanted to be a Lawyer. I had a scholarship to PittLaw but I never showed up my first year. I took a year off and moved to LA to be an actor. That didn't work out so I started at PittLaw the year after Undergrad (they held my scholarship, so that was dope). Then I quit law school after the first semester. Then I tried to go back and quit again. Then I finally went back 2 years later and finished and then came back home to start my Practice. I am telling you all of this for a specific reason. That is because in between all of those times of quitting law school or not even starting law school and all that time that I spent in between my stints in law school I was simply never ever able to find something else to do with my life. It was like I was bred for law and that was it. Like, I'm pretty smart, especially at school, so maybe I'd go back to school...but for what? Or maybe I'll start my own business doing something creative...but what? I further stated earlier that I burned every bridge when I quit my Practice a year and a half ago...why? Because I knew I'd go back like I always did...like the burning of the bridges would FORCE me to find a new career path. But here I sit, all these years later and all those accolades later and all that money is gone, all of my retirement and I might lose my condo now and I still cannot think of what to do next for work. Months and months passed where I was thinking that there is something wrong with my psychologically and of me having to deal with my family all looking at me like I'm crazy and "You have to find a job, Chetty" and I thought the answer would pop up at some time here...but it never did. And then, last week, it dawned on me...I always reverted back to law because I AM UNABLE TO TRAVEL A PATH THAT I HAVE NOT ALREADY EXPERIENCED. In other words, my inability to visual or imagine or whatever hindered my ability to find a career that I actually would have enjoyed. I've always been good at whatever it was that I was doing, but only if there was a syllabus or if the path was laid out for me, as in my family businesses. Take that away and put a fork in the road (which I never knew people could ACTUALLY VISUALIZE) and I'm simply standing at the edge of what is happening in the present moment. I get all of the things and revelations that everyone with Aphantasia talks about...the "oh, you're for real when you visualize stuff...it's not a metaphor or euphemistic". And that was a shock...but no one (that I have seen yet, at least) discusses HOW THEY MAY HAVE DONE THINGS DIFFERENTLY had they known that almost EVERYONE in society experiences life differently than we do. I liken being able to see images and to foretell through visual experiences how certain actions one takes will or could end up as a superpower. Fore, had I been able to FORESEE losing my Condo in a literal sense, maybe I wouldn't have made the decision to quit to abruptly or to burn all the bridges. Don't get me wrong, I KNEW that if I couldn't pay my mortgage I would lose my house...but I had never EXPERIENCED it before so it wasn't that real to me. FURTHER, had I KNOWN that I was going to feel the same way (directionless) still at 42 as I did when I was 18, I wouldn't have done those things or acted (as others would tell me, and which I didn't understand until now) as reckless or cavalier in my decision making. The fact that I couldn't see or imagine other avenues or trajectories for me to travel for a career AND THE FACT THAT OTHERS COULD AND CAN would have changed everything about my life. I have never regretted a moment in my life...I am a poster child for only looking forward and from learning from things in the past, but had I had ANY idea that I was being hindered so intensely with an inability to foresee or imagine or whatever, I would have sought counsel or understood WHY I thought I had to be a lawyer. I mean, I wouldn't have ever even applied to law school in the first place. I felt so dumb for not being able to see another career path. I tried and I tried and I always boomeranged back to law. Now I up that creek...I'll figure it out...I always do, and I'm blessed to see how my Aphantasia affected how the first 42 years of my life panned out...and I'm further blessed for all of the great fortunes I have been given in this life, but my sole purpose for writing this epistle on your page (sorry, this is where this landed haha), is to raise awareness so that other people that experience life the way we do can UNDERSTAND that other people can visualize things they have never experienced. And from that visualization they can make a somewhat "educated" guess as to whether or not they should "decide" to go that route or not. I always thought I just didn't want a family or kids...it never dawned on me that just because I couldn't SEE IT in my future doesn't mean that I necessarily don't want it! I just wasn't able to see all the joy children bring to a parent because I never experienced it. That you for listening or reading if you even made it this far. I'm doing my best to accept this and get passed it, but it's going to take me a minute, but I just don't want someone else to get stuck in a lifelong rut because they didn't realize that other people have something they don't have...a mind's eye. I literally probably would have done everything different had I only known. At least I know now...