I remember as a child being in my elementary school, walking down a hallway I had navigated many times in my short life, and suddenly having my perspective flip so that nothing around me looked familiar. A creeping fear took hold of me, as I frantically looked around searching for something familiar to latch onto. I started to wonder how I would explain myself to anyone who asked me where I was going, when, just as suddenly, everything flipped back, and I knew exactly where I was, where I was going, and how to get there.
Since then, this phenomenon of visiting an alternate universe of sorts has reoccurred many times in my life - when I’m out driving around, when I’m running, always when I’m headed somewhere familiar - but I’ve learned to be patient, knowing I’ll get my knowledge back of where I am spatially if I stay calm and wait. If I mentally picture someplace well known to me, like my home, things come back to normal even faster. This technique has never failed me.
I described these experiences to a psychiatrist I was seeing in my thirties, and he laughed and said it was a result of having a creative mind, not to worry. He pooh-poohed my thinking that it might be linked to dementia, something both my parents suffered from in their later years.
I have also recently realized (in the past ten years) that I have a form of face blindness, a condition with the strange moniker of Prosopagnosia. My rendition of it is fairly mild, although it’s pronounced enough to have caused me some social embarrassment, mistaking someone I have recently met for another person. If two women I don’t know well are about the same age, height, weight, and hair color, for instance, and I meet them around the same time, I will be apt to confuse them. (One woman even told me to stop calling her by the wrong name.) Or I will run into someone I recently met and not recognize them as they greet me cheerfully, by name. Everyone seems better at this recognition thing than I am.
I often become hopelessly lost in movie plots, because I can’t keep the actors straight, especially if they’re actors who are unknown to me. This has improved over the years, as I can now access information on the movie I’m going to see, and prepare myself for character identification.
I am in awe of the people who say, “I never forget a face,” as my mantra is that I never remember one. Slight exaggeration; of course I know “my people” when I see them…but not far off from the truth when it comes to new people in my life, or anything lower than first party relationships. But the first party people - my family, my good friends - I can tell who they are from two blocks away. They represent safety, growth, love, and comfort in my life, in sharp contrast to those I struggle to remember, who represent uncertainty, embarrassment, and discomfort. Social media has also been tremendously helpful in putting names to faces.
When I discovered this condition, I thought it must be a form of social terror, as I am typically shy in unfamiliar social situations. I was frightened of other children when I was little (mostly because I didn’t think I would measure up to their expectations), and that could have done something to deter growth in the part of my brain that helps with facial recognition. And when you’re young, you don’t know how other people operate, so that further prevents you from being conscious of a personal anomaly and taking action to correct it. With three children to look after, my parents probably just shrugged it off, if they noticed anything peculiar at all.
Now I’ve found by poking around Google that these two conditions have been theoretically linked. People with spatial disorientation and prosopagnosia, while not common (at least with current research tools), are known hand-holding conditions. They both have to do with recognition, so may access the same parts of the brain. Or they may not be related at all. I guess we’ll know when more of the brain’s secrets are revealed.
My mother struggled with spatial orientation her entire life, and my father (who always knew exactly where he was on planet Earth) used to joke that if he hadn’t come along, she would have disappeared into the ether. I was discussing it with her one day while visiting Milwaukee, and not believing anyone could be that clueless, I asked her, “Okay, which way is Lake Michigan?”
She looked at me with her surprised, eyebrows up expression, and asked, “How in the world would I know that?”
Hmmm. This could be where my spatial disorientation gene came from, but at least I could point in the direction of Lake Michigan. And I found my way to hundreds of gigs before GPS was a thing. I don’t think sense of direction is the same thing as what I’m talking about here. My disorientation only happens to me in very familiar spaces, as if the universe is showing me an alternate way of looking at things.
And maybe that’s where my face blindness comes from as well. People aren’t what they look like, there’s a lot more to them than that. What they look like is simply how they present themselves to the world, not who they really are. Maybe my psychiatrist was right: the world is not how we perceive it anyway, so what’s the harm of playing around with it, imagining it in different costumes?
Comments