Living with aphantasia my entire life has been really difficult, I’ve always felt that I was “wrong” because I couldn’t learn or express myself the way others could. I only learned of the condition in the last 10 or so years? So since then I’ve been able to catalogue a few more memories and am trying to write more.
When regular people read books they can take the imagery that’s being described to them and create the mental imagery in their heads to be able to live in the story or view it in a way similar to a movie, whereas I only see words, I cannot take the words in front of me and create an image in my brain, meaning reading books doesn’t have any effect on me.
And it’s not just literature this affects, my memories of my childhood, my teens, and of important moments of my life I’m never able to revisit in my waking hours, because I don’t see anything, I know names and places, but faces and people are nothing but words etched into my head.
When I dream I am sometimes able to reach a lucid state that allows me to view some images but they’re often distorted and feel very liminal (hence my love for liminal spaces media like the backrooms and analog horror) however this also causes moments in which I am unsure of whether something actually happened in my life or was conjured by my subconscious brain
But it’s a very lonely existence because once a moment has passed, unless I have photographic evidence of the event, it’s something I’ll never experience again even in my memories.