My beloved has this thing. It has a name.
Great start to a post Anna, very strong. Why don’t we look that up before we start the blog post next time?
Aphantasia! It’s called Aphantasia. Which, to be honest, I’m pretty sure is a Disney cartoon, so no wonder I couldn’t remember the name of it, but whatever.
It means you can’t see pictures in your head. Like, it’s partly not being able to picture people you know and love, which sucks. But when someone describes a picture. Or when you read a description of a scene in a novel — he just doesn’t have the ability to build that image in his head in a way that he can “see”. It’s not a visual thing.
And for a long time I couldn’t quite work out what he meant by that, and then when we discovered it was not completely unusual, I read up about it, and sort of understood it more. But what still completely confuddled me was the fact that he simply couldn’t wrap his head around what it must be like to see pictures in one’s head. Basically: He couldn’t even picture me being able to picture the things I pictured in my head when I picture things. Which makes sense, in that he couldn’t picture things but… I couldn’t step into his shoes and understand his confusion.
Until the moment he revealed that he somehow DOESN’T ever think about being attacked by a squirrel while on the toilet.
And I stopped, aghast, and tried to work out how it might be possible to not think about being attacked by a squirrel while on the toilet. Or a rat. Or a shark.
This has led me to go on a journey of self-interrogation. Like… what OTHER thoughts may not be constantly present for everyone else? What other things does my anxiety-free beloved NEVER think about?!
So: Full disclosure, I have always been a person with anxiety, and that amount of anxiety has gone up and down and been more or less problematic at different times in my life and right now it is not very problematic at all. It is just a way my brain is wired and I’m now used to observing these thoughts and then working out how to deal with them. It’s when I don’t have the capacity or can’t work out how to deal with them that they become problematic and overwhelming. But that’s not now.
Anyway. I’m just trying to make it ENTIRELY clear this blog post is not a cry for help before anyone emails me all worrity-like.
SO:
It was when I first watched Jaws with my older brother and sister at too young an age and one of them mentioned that it has been known for sharks to swim up the u-bend from the sewer that this idea first became problematic. I was wary of going for a wee for weeks.
Eventually this wore off, until sometime in my mid-twenties when I realised that rats DO sometimes do this. And from there in my head it became squirrels and… anyway. I have never yet been bitten on the arse by a squirrel mid-poop, but the point is, it crosses my mind as I enter the bathroom at home quite frequently.
I checked with my beloved and, it turns out: No. This hasn’t occurred to him even once. Let alone on a semi-regular basis! Remarkable.
This prompted me to check other things that seem like totally normal run-of-the-mill thoughts to me and see whether they are regular visitors to his brain. I have been keeping a list.
The list of thoughts that have occurred to me that yes should be interrogated and maybe subsequently dismissed, but are definitely TOTALLY NORMAL things to think
- toilet squirrels. As above.
- toilet sharks. again.
- toilet ceiling rats: similar, but the idea that in a commercial building with a false ceiling, one of the roof panels will collapse under the weight of a rodent that will fall on you as you pee.
- toilet ceiling corpse: same but dead body. not sure how it got up there. that part of the process is not my responsibility,
- luminolosity: The feeling of walking into a hotel room and casually wondering how many dead people have been found in there.
- luxury property? schmuschury schmoperty more like: Looking out over a beautiful view of houses along a shoreline and having your first thought be “tsunami?”.
- more dead bodies? The sense that opening a office supply cupboard in your office will almost certainly reveal a crime scene.
- priorities: “If I have a heart attack on this exercise bike, will I fall off or slump forward?”
- “Ouch”: The possibility that potatoes might be sentient.
- Gravity problems: Double decker buses should definitely fall over sometimes, but only, almost certainly, when I am on them.
- gravity problems II: Pilots who use the phrase “we’ll be on the ground in 20 minutes” rather than “landing in 20 minutes” know that “on the ground” in one piece seems unlikely to them in that moment.
- poison envelope glue: not, like, maliciously poisoned. Just been peed on by the wrong kind of frog or something while in the manufacturing process.
- hat required: heavy cloud problems. Also: sudden-bird-confidence-issue problems.
I have more. I may add more. But I may just keep collecting them. I can’t help but keep collecting them.
Point is, my beloved LITERALLY NEVER thinks of these things. Like, has never walked across an open area of parkland and wondered if a seagull is going to suddenly forget how to fly directly above him and land on his head.
He can’t even picture it!
He can’t picture me picturing it.
And yet me? Picturing it all is all I can do. I walk into any situation and the universe unfolds like a complex origami puzzle with each fold containing a possible different version of the picture and my brain is able to scan the whole image and find the most extreme and ridiculous fold and blow it up and flesh it out.
Anxiety-brain is awesome like that.
(honestly it is awesome like that. flipped in a different way it’s my creative brain. but… you don’t need anxiety to be creative. you just need to be able to understand the origami without focussing on the furthest corner of the paper)
(or something?)
(I folded this metaphor in on itself too many times and now can’t remember how to unfold it again)
(also I meant to go to bed an hour ago and got led off thinking about the potential for wolf ghosts in my basement.)
little.red.boat 