Inability to visualize
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I thought of all the paragraphs I’d skimmed as a reader. Tell us more about these mountains, this city, the room, my workshop peers would say. Predictably-in hindsight-much of the critical feedback I received to my early writing was that I needed to create more of a sense of scene. It’s nice to finally understand why those paragraphs exist. Can we please move on to some action now?” I don’t need every spire described to me. And yet as a kid, I remember rolling my eyes over paragraphs-long descriptions, thinking things along the lines of “okay, great, it’s an ice city, I get it. In fact, in writing the above I initially typed “excessive descriptions of setting.” Even now, I have to stop and remind myself that to most people, these descriptions aren’t excessive-they’re thorough, perhaps delightfully so. No matter how beautiful the scene or how great the writing, after a couple of sentences, my attention drifts. I have always been bored by long descriptions of setting in books. My inability to visualize also explains some things when it comes to my history as a writer. It still boggles my mind that my classmates might have actually been seeing colors, not just naming them. The whatever-something wasn’t any color, obviously, unless I chose one-what was the use of this ridiculous exercise?
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People around me were calling out colors without hesitation, as though they actually saw something, and that annoyed me. In response I felt a sense of impatience and disdain so intense it bordered on disgust. I remember in high school being told to close my eyes and imagine… something, and being asked what color the whatever-something was. There is no part of me that feels as though my experience or perception of the world, my life, is lacking.īut now that I accept that visualization in a real thing, a few things from my past have clicked into a new level of understanding. Whatever gap might exist in my thinking because of my inability to visualize, it’s been filled with words and a thrumming sense of how those words can interact with-spark, express, influence-emotion. Rather, I’m hanging out on the fringes of a crowd that encompasses a huge variety of abilities and experiences. I’m not some sad outlier isolated off in my own empty world while everyone else joyfully conjures images of apples or their mother at will. It seems clear that the ability to visualize exists on a spectrum. Still, I struggle to perceive my apparent aphantasia as an absence. The concept that most people can close their eyes and see whatever they want to see is still so foreign to me it’s nearly incomprehensible, but I’m doing my best to accept that it’s true. Often I’m putting myself in the place of a character I’m writing, trying to figure out exactly how she would respond to a situation, whether it’s what she would be saying or the emotions she would be feeling. When I daydream, my thoughts drift through silent conversations-sometimes with myself, sometimes not. I might not be able to conjure images, but in their place my imagination is dominated by words. Somewhere in there, it hit me: Instead of having a mind’s eye, I have a mind’s voice. Apparently most people can close their eyes and see-with varying degrees of clarity-whatever it is they want to see: a beach, an apple, their husband’s face. Something about that feeling and the way the sun was hitting the mountains in the distance pinged off an impassioned, imaginary conversation that was running through my head, and it made me wonder how someone else might experience that same exact moment, if rather than having words running through their head, they might see pictures layering themselves upon the mountains. Until a few weeks ago, when I was walking on a trail near my house, paying attention to the sensation of a cool breeze as it eased the tension in my temples. Over the next few years, I thought of visualization only occasionally. After a few days of simmering incredulity, thoughts of aphantasia faded from my mind. Part of me couldn’t let go of the idea that our differences must be more of a matter of communication than actual experience. I retweeted the article, expressing my amazement, and a writer I know told me his novel ideas come to him like movies that he writes down after watching, I’d heard of writers whose plots come to them in dreams, and that I could understand-my dreams are intensely visual, fully immersive experiences-but to see a story while awake? I believed him, and yet I didn’t.