Sarah Anger

Ive known about aphantasia for years, and I've always known that I don't have it. What I didn't realise until very recently was that it's a whole spectrum. I was listening to my favourite content creators discuss the levels of their phantasia when I became very interested in the topic. I have a never-ending inner monologue that drives me insane, but keeps me company at all times. I can visualise very loosely. It's less of an experience and more of a single, warped, dark, hard to understand image, when I remember something I saw in my past. My factual and spacial memory is not good either, which doesn't help, but through aphantasia network I've learned that those are different categories of memory. I'm an artist. I've always felt so inadequate when it comes to coming up with ideas and working quickly, compared to my artist friends. Now I understand why I often go through multiple re-paints on the same canvas trying to decipher what I want when people I know can simply paint start to finish. It's not that I don't spend time planning. I probably spend a lot more time planning than the people I'm thinking of do. It's that I can't picture how I want the work to come out, so I have to simulate it, and rethink it many times over on paper. I've realised that the content creator who I was listening to discuss their aphantasia, who is also an artist, has a very similar creative process to me. I think their aphantasia shows strongly in their art and in their creative process, once you know they have it. And that was comforting to me, that I and so many other people could love their art despite their inability to plan it out in their mind's eye like other people. It takes them longer to toy with ideas just like me, but their art comes out just as beautiful and creative. Once again, I do not have aphantasia, but I do find myself leaning closer to that side of the visualization spectrum, especially when the visualizations are meant to be fully created within my mind. Did you know that some people can visualize math equations in their mind? I'd forget one number as soon as I move to the next. So thank you aphantasia network for this journey of understanding myself, who always thought I was "slower" than others, or just incapable of being creative, when that's the thing that drives me the most in the world. Your creativity is not bound by your imagination.