So many of you probably know that I am an industrial designer by trade. One of the things that makes me really good at my job is that I have an aptitude for 3-dimensional thinking. (Like I’ve actually been tested professionally and I’m in the 80th percentile!) This is really awesome and all but it comes at the cost of me not being able to think in some 2-dimensional formats without a lot of effort and anxiety. (Honestly, I have no way of knowing if I am actually bad at this or if I’m just so good at the 3D format that being “average” at the 2D formats feels like I’m bad at it.)
This mostly comes into play when we talk about graphs and charts. When I look at one of these, it’s like I can feel the wheels in my brain creaking so slowly as it tries to compute. To my knowledge, some people can take a chart apart in seconds and articulate the information within it while I have to sometimes physically take my fingers and “have them meet in the middle” and heavens-forbid it is a page I have to scroll and flip and not all the information can be in sight at a time! This meant that while I was very good at science, in school, I was slow at determining relevant recorded data (part of why I didn’t go into that field).
Now you might be thinking, “don’t you do 2D art?!”, to which you are mistaken. Some of my art may be flat, like a painting or drawing, but it is 3D in my head. Color is dimension. Shadows and light are dimension. Even if the perspective is warped, I’m turning the image around in my brain as I make it. I’m creating layers of media, whether it is tactile or not. The reason perhaps you see it as 2D is because maybe that’s how your brain interprets it.
And I can’t completely avoid the kind of 2D data that creates so much anxiety for me but I try really hard to minimize my exposure to it because that is a kind of self care.
Mostly, I just needed to write this down somewhere. Maybe someone else has a similar problem and this helps them understand?
