APHANTASIA's EFFECT ON MY LIFE -- IT'S NOT A DISNEY MOVIE

APHANTASIA's EFFECT ON MY LIFE
             IT'S NOT A DISNEY MOVIE
By Charles E. Kraus

Your Mind's Eye is a personalized audio/visual console capable of playing archived memories, fantasies, predictions, pleasant dreams and traumatic nightmares right beneath your eyes.

Try this:  Focus on something or someone situated across the room -- a person, a painting, a pet.   Concentrate for a few seconds.  Close your eyes and recall what you've just been looking at out there in the "real" world.  Reproduce "out there" in your mind.  Now, change the picture.  Ask your memory to take a look at its storehouse of remembered images featuring your family and friends. Hear them conversing.  Flip to your fantasy setting and take a look at your dog using a spoon as he sits at the table eating doggy chow and lapping beer.  Conjure up a rabbit pulling a magician out of a hat.  Imagine a portrait of your very own face growing a beard right before you Mind's Eye.

You've been channel surfing inside your head, reviewing Mind's Eye programming available to you and you alone.  Each of us subscribes to a unique internal audio-video production service.    Sadly, my service is, well ...... out of service.

As far as I know, my Mind's Eye never worked. It isn't even capable of conjuring up intelligible sound.  And so, I cannot quite "see" the  images nor can I recall the voices -- of my co-workers, my friends, my wife, my kids.  What I observe amounts to a dark cloud.  And what I hear is a muffled generic garble rather than the sweet utterances of my children.  Their vocal  quality,  textures, tones and speech patterns, are vague approximation of dialogue,  offered to me not as tone but as noise.

Instead of providing pictures and sounds, my Minds Eye offers concepts and knowledge, ideas.   These are simply delivered to my 'somehow-I-know-zone' -- facts passed along as understandings to be acted upon.  "I can't show them to you," my memory and reasoning say, "you'll have to accept what we tell you, quite literarily, on blind faith."

I recognize words written by others.  But if I'm doing the writing, I know how to spell something or I do not.  The correct arrangement of letters either pops into my know-zone, then onto the screen, or it doesn't.  My fingers type letters.  I'm either looking at the intended word, a different word, or a word that is so unique, so specialized, that it will never appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.  No alphabetical sequence gets displayed in my Mind's Eye.  I've never said to myself, "so that is how it looks," and then reproduced the findings on a keyboard.

Something happens when I attempt to visualize.  A vague sense, a sensation, a cloud, a feeling occurs in my mind.  It is from this mist that I withdraw information.

Ask me to describe a friend.  I'll tell you all the traits I've noticed about him over the years.  He's tall, has a long neck, receding hairline, seemed to have difficulty keeping his shirttail tucked in.  Stammers when upset.  Is a pretty darn good chess player and a terrific father.   I can talk about him, but am not guided by an internal picture of the guy.  If he disappeared and the police wanted me to describe my buddy, I wouldn't be much help.

I dream concepts, stage directions and plot summaries.  I understand what is happening: I sit down. Suddenly I'm in a field.  I am upset and worried that I won't get home in time for something important.  I sense the tension, the setting, the characters, but I don't witness any of it.  I'm merely aware of the situation.

When I was a kid, the term "learning disability" had not yet been invented.  Back then the technical name for children who had difficulty reading and/or spelling was "dumbbell."  "Stupid idiot" was an acceptable alternative.  Being so classified, I was sent to remedial-just-about-everything-classes.  I got to visit the reading specialist for twenty minutes twice a week.  She wanted me to break words into syllables, to 'sound them out."  But I couldn't recall the agreed upon sounds of the letter combinations.

I either knew how to say and/or spell a word or I did not.  Certain words worked.  They were ok.  I could do them, count on them, use them in public without revealing my ignorance.  Others challenged me.  I needed to avoid these.  I could force-learn the "correct" way to spell something, on a temporary basis.  Sadly, within five minutes, the information would begin to evaporate.  Ten minutes after that it would gone.  Added to my hopeless list.

I dreaded certain things. Spelling tests, for sure.  And worse than these, spelling bees.  I saw the bees as an opportunity to display my muddled mind.  To stand up in front of the entire class and embarrass myself yet again, reenforcing for others and for my withering self image, just how ridiculous I was.

Strangely, at least I thought it strange, I could think.  I mean, I was logical.  And I often detected signs of illogic in others.  I couldn't spell, but they couldn't reason.  I discovered that you didn't have to say the words when you read.  You could just absorb them.  No names please, just the facts.  That worked best if a book or story interested me.  The older I grew the more interests I seemed to develop.  I could read humor.  I could read about performing magic tricks, about psychology, about history.  During my teen years, I could read anything suggestive.  My limitations were challenges that I attempted to solve by experimentation.  For example, I figured out that for some reason it was easier for me to read material written in the first person.  That it was hopeless for me to attempt to read comic books, the word bubbles, the captions, the cartoon figures conspired to confuse and distract me.

In a very peculiar way, my deficiencies offered benefits.  I was pretty darn good at knowing which words I could not spell.   During tests and classroom assignments that attempted to assess my writing skills, I'd start a sentence, get to a potential word blunder and instead of allowing the jumbled letters onto the page, I'd spin my mind searching for alternative ways to make my point.  This turned out to be a useful skill.

Dictionaries were not helpful.  Sure, they offered the correct spelling, but only if you had some theory of the word, some reasonable approximation of its lettering.  Often, I couldn't figure out if it was a "b" or a "t," if it used an "i" or an "e,"  began with an "o" or an "a."  Word List books, no definitions, just alphabetized collects of the most popular ten thousand or twenty thousand or forty thousand words in the English language, reduce the time it took to scour prospects.  Better than these were my self created word lists.  I didn't need to search through forty thousand words, just the ones in my working vocabulary.  And even better than personalized collections was Paula Levy.

Paula Levy is not a book or site.  She's a friend, and for several years, those prior to spelling machines and spell check, Paula made herself available to help me during my language crises.  I was out of school by the time she signed on to this ridiculous assignment.  Many were the emergencies during my life as an administrative nothing in particular that I'd whisper into an office phone, 'Hi Paula, how do you spell efficiency, or determine, or consequential," or ... just about any word that a normal person could put on paper without a consultation.  She saved me.  Endlessly.

Details and clues are missing from my world.  Internal puzzle pieces that enhance life and help people get through their days have not been provided to mine.  Instead, I've been encumbered with endless apprehension; with a regularly scheduled set of frustrating questions.  Should I say that word out loud?  Should I write it down for others to read?  Which child, adult, product, flower, was the one in the picture I'd been shown, the one I was supposed to meet, purchase, retrieve, avoid?

During the course of my life, I've held many jobs.  On three occasions, I've taken extensive Civil Service exams.  The first was to compete for an administrative position at a public television station operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District.  Rising to the occasion, I spent four years at KLCS-TV.   When the work became tedious, I took the exam for Information Officer offered by a community college.  The testing involved a great deal of writing, and therefore, lots of opportunities to show off my creative spelling.  Using various tricks to avoid errors, including scouring the test questions for words I could use in my essays, I managed another first place.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, a hiring freeze was implemented just as I was about to come on board.

And finally, having relocated to Seattle, tightly budgeted and looking for a little stability, I took the County's Legal Assistant exam.  I was familiar with courtroom jargon and the procedural aspects of the job.  I could type fast.  If I stuck to my lexicon of the words I was comfortable pronouncing, the interview would be a snap.  But the County snuck in a spelling test.  A SPELLING TEST!   I suffered through the multiple choice, wrote best guesses for the fill in the blanks, and went home.

Amazingly, the next day, I received a call asking me to return for a final interview.  Would they actually hire a legal assistant who didn't know how to spell the word statute?   As instructed, I met with the head of HR.  We were chatting amicably when her associate entered the room carrying a file folder with my name on it.  Together they reviewed my exam results.  It was easy to tell when they got to the spelling test, easy to spot the look of amazement on their faces.  My other test results had been respectable.  How could the spelling be so ....   The score was insanely dismal.   It was too low to be believed.  They looked at me then back to the file.

"I think there is some problem with the test," the interviewer said.  Not with my answers.  She was inferring the methodology was at fault.  "Never mind this," she said, ripping up my spelling responses and throwing the page into the trash.  She seemed desperate to hire someone and it was going to be me.

My preference for self-employment hasn't always been practical, but moving into this phase of my work life, I am please that I no longer have to hide my shortcomings from coworkers and supervisors.

"Aphantasia!" I should have explained to all who pondered my cognitive limitations.   But back then, the term had yet to be coined.  I'm grateful somebody finally gave it a name.

Even as my essay concludes, I've had to scroll back to check the spelling of my disorder.  I'm uncertain of how Aphantasia is spelled, but I know how it feels.