A few days ago, I was feeling a little overwhelmed by everything going on in my life at that moment. My mind was racing, so I decided that I should meditate. It's something I had not done for over a year but I used to do daily. I sat on my bed and crossed my legs. I closed my eyes, cleared my mind instantly, something which has always seemed to be a skill that I have, and focused on my breath. I sat there for maybe 60 seconds. Then I got the idea in my head to start to visualize things. I don't remember what I was trying to imagine, but I was going through several objects. After maybe 30s of this, I opened my eyes and said in my head "Wait a minute... I can't see anything." I closed my eyes again and tried to visualize basic shapes, but paying closer attention to what I was actually experiencing. Extremely simple shapes like an equilateral triangle and a square came to mind. I saw the same familiar sight that I have for 20 years—darkness, static. "Hold on, I've heard about this kind of condition before." I looked up on Google "condition where you can't visualize shapes". The Google AI overview unfurled immediately and an animation played that highlighted a single word: aphantasia. I had heard that word before on the podcast called The Rest Is Science. They were talking about how some people don't have an inner monologue and how that condition is correlated with aphantasia, not being able to visualize. I do have an inner monologue (though it is minimal) and I was under the impression that I have been 'visualizing' my whole life, so I thought to myself "Huh, that's funny. I didn't know that people can't visualize". I conflated the two ideas together and moved on thinking that I was not part of either group. It was just a few days after I listened to this podcast that I discovered that I have aphantasia. What followed the discovery was me staying up late into the night researching what this condition is and testing myself to see if I'm not fooling myself and I actually have it. Eventually, I could not but believe it. In the following days, many things that set me apart from others, that made me question myself, started to make sense. As a kid, I loved drawing, but only tracing or copying, not using my creativity in freestyle. I was never drawn to reading and preferred watching videos. My memory of movies and TV shows was always very vague while others' weren't. Not just the negative things but the positive things too. I've always been an extremely logical thinker. I excelled in science and math. Unlike many others with aphantasia, I've never thought that 'visualize' was just a metaphor– I thought I could do it. I assumed that everyone else's mental experiences were the same as mine. But only after deep introspection I realized that my way of visualization is not at all similar to vision, unlike how people without aphantasia report. It's more abstract and about relations of ideas rather than looking at the components of an image.

A few days ago, I was feeling a little overwhelmed by everything going on in my life at that moment. My mind was racing, so I decided that I should meditate. It's something I had not done for over a year but I used to do daily. I sat on my bed and crossed my legs. I closed my eyes, cleared my mind instantly, something which has always seemed to be a skill that I have, and focused on my breath. I sat there for maybe 60 seconds. Then I got the idea in my head to start to visualize things. I don't remember what I was trying to imagine, but I was going through several objects. After maybe 30s of this, I opened my eyes and said in my head "Wait a minute... I can't see anything." I closed my eyes again and tried to visualize basic shapes, but paying closer attention to what I was actually experiencing. Extremely simple shapes like an equilateral triangle and a square came to mind. I saw the same familiar sight that I have for 20 years—darkness, static. "Hold on, I've heard about this kind of condition before." I looked up on Google "condition where you can't visualize shapes". The Google AI overview unfurled immediately and an animation played that highlighted a single word: aphantasia. I had heard that word before on the podcast called The Rest Is Science. They were talking about how some people don't have an inner monologue and how that condition is correlated with aphantasia, not being able to visualize. I do have an inner monologue (though it is minimal) and I was under the impression that I have been 'visualizing' my whole life, so I thought to myself "Huh, that's funny. I didn't know that people can't visualize". I conflated the two ideas together and moved on thinking that I was not part of either group. It was just a few days after I listened to this podcast that I discovered that I have aphantasia. What followed the discovery was me staying up late into the night researching what this condition is and testing myself to see if I'm not fooling myself and I actually have it. Eventually, I could not but believe it. In the following days, many things that set me apart from others, that made me question myself, started to make sense. As a kid, I loved drawing, but only tracing or copying, not using my creativity in freestyle. I was never drawn to reading and preferred watching videos. My memory of movies and TV shows was always very vague while others' weren't. Not just the negative things but the positive things too. I've always been an extremely logical thinker. I excelled in science and math. Unlike many others with aphantasia, I've never thought that 'visualize' was just a metaphor– I thought I could do it. I assumed that everyone else's mental experiences were the same as mine. But only after deep introspection I realized that my way of visualization is not at all similar to vision, unlike how people without aphantasia report. It's more abstract and about relations of ideas rather than looking at the components of an image.