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SarahJane's avatar

Warning: Might be TL:DR.

I discovered a few months ago that I'm the lone outlier in a household of face blind people. It was a real, 'Wait, what?' moment.

Imagine this around the family dining table: My oldest was in her first term at high school and had just taken part in an outdoor-pursuits type day which was intended to be a form-class bonding thing. We were looking at some photos of the day which had been posted online and I pointed to the only adult in an image and said, 'So that's your form teacher, then?'

Daughter, squinting: 'Uhh, I guess? Maybe?'

Me: 'So you think that isn't her? Who else attended?'

Daughter: 'I dunno. I mean, it COULD be her...'

Me: 'Well, what does she look like?"

Daughter: ...

Nothing. Literally nothing. And I was trying to take in how it was possible to not be able to recall even BASIC stuff about somebody you saw every day, and I said; 'Can you not just visualise her?'

Husband: 'Hey, what are you talking about? You mean, like, SEE somebody's face in your mind?'

Me: 'Yes. Bingo.'

Husband: 'I can't do that.'

Son: 'I can't do that.'

I kinda didn't believe them. I said to the kids, 'But you know what Granddad looks like, right?'

'Sure,' they say.

'Okay, describe him.'

'Umm...he's tall.' 'And he wears glasses.'

And that was them done - for a person they've seen a couple of times a week for their whole lives.

Whereas, me? 'He's tall, and thin, and starting to be a little bit stooped, and yes he wears glasses, and he has white hair which falls over his forehead and quite a small nose for a guy and mad thick eyebrows and grey eyes and in-turned lips and one of those smiles that curves down rather than up and big teeth which are a bit jumbled and deep grooves down each side of his nose and...'

Husband: 'You really do have, like, a photo in your head you're working off, don't you?'

Me: 'Yep. What do you have?'

Husband: 'Um. A list, I guess. Just...facts I have to remember. And associate with a person. Along with their damn name and whose Dad they are...'

And the weirdest thing of all? The other three members of my household DON'T need to rotate maps or Lego instruction booklets so that they're oriented according to current reality - if they have an object or a road in front of them they can rotate stuff, even complex three-dimensional half-made models, in-their-heads. And I can't...

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Max Kelly's avatar

Dear David, wanting to comment on this finally forced my hand to subscribe, something I’ve been contemplating a while. I have mild prosopagnosia, faces out of context, even well known faces, are a problem for me. I was reading Dr Oliver Sacks Musicophillia where I first encountered the the term prosopagnosia, something Sacks suffered from. There must be a genetic element to it as my late Sister, Helen Kelly, also had some degree of it. Love your writing ❤️

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