I guess several newspapers (notably The Guardian) ran articles in the last few weeks about aphantasia, the inability to picture things in your mind. It affects, they conjectured, about four percent of people, though I don't know how they determined that. Three people in the span of two weeks told me they had it, therefore establishing it in my mind as the new ADHD or autism. It's not actually a disability, it's just an inability. I listened to people telling me this and thought "Okay, and?" and then I thought "Can I picture things?" I'm not really sure. I don't know that I need to.
When I was in university we used to talk about things like this all the time, what was reality and how we perceived reality and what that perception might mean, how it might affect how we feel about it. Are we all seeing the same blue? Then I guess I started thinking about other things. When people tell me "picture this" I understand it as "I'm setting a scene for you" but not as something I'm actually expected to visualize until it comes to life. I understand that I'm expected to imagine something and I sort of do, but it's not, like, an image. It's a shared metaphor, or at least I thought so. Dunno. It's not a medical diagnosis (I'm not even sure it can be diagnosed -- parts of your brain would fire up, I guess?).
I have monopsia, meaning that I only look out of one eye at a time, and therefore only see things as two-dimensional. I didn't realize this was a thing (I thought everybody saw what I saw) until those "magic eye" books became trendy, early 90s I guess. I had a moment where I realized that quite probably a lot of things that I thought were a "personality" for me (like "not liking sports") were just the result of not seeing distances (so, for example, being unable to track a ball well enough to catch it or hit it or whatever I was expected to do). Also, a dread of uneven walking surfaces, such as stairs. It didn't really bother me until 3D movies were everywhere. Suddenly people were grabbing at the air in the theater, which was annoying, and the movies all looked out of focus to me.
I think it's cool that, partly through the magic of the internet, we are able to learn things about ourselves without too much effort. I used to go to libraries more (I believe that I learned that I was only seeing out of one eye in my 20s, before computers were standard, though how common this was and what it might have affected came later and probably from the comfort of my own lilypad jumps across screens). I do worry at the amount of self-diagnosis that goes on, and more importantly the amount of conclusions that get reached. If I've made it this far seeing out of one eye and seeing very little in my mind, does it matter particularly? Not to me. Probably not.
I do note that I get a little impatient with some of the self-diagnosis going around, which is not particularly nice of me because empathy and patience really take so little effort. But I feel like sometimes we use these things to excuse us from doing things we might not particularly want to do, rather than as a reason that those things might be difficult and we might take a little longer to learn how to deal in a society set up for people to not have those challenges. Like being left-handed or something I guess. Less visible.
I thought I'd have more to say if I let this marinate but it has a ways to go. I'll put it here to remember that I was pondering ability and disability and inability in April 2024.
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