My disability story pt 3/?
Ran out of energy to finish this before the end of Disability Pride month but I'm forging on anyway!
Last time I talked about my autism. Some notable traits to include are severe prosopagnosia and topographical disorientation aka "face and map blindness" but I don't like those terms because it makes people think I literally can't see faces/maps. Proso is shorter anyway and so is "bad at maps". They're both related to the same part of the brain. Basically most people are born with built in software that sees a face and saves it as a face.
I didn't get that update so my brain processes facial features separate from each other. I have to memorize faces "manually" by studying every square inch of them in a variety of microexpressions. Imagine trying to find a quote in a book of a language you don't read. You'd have to look at each sentence and word one at a time. Eventually you'd probably pick up some clues to help narrow it down. Same with proso. I distinguish people mainly by context, hair, clothes, voice, gait, mannerisms, etc.
I manage pretty well but interacting with new people is challenging. It's hurt my relationships when people take it personally. It's affected my job performance many times (customers get mad if you greet them too many times)
Directional difficulties are similar, I can memorize a route or a map if I study it enough times but without an internal GPS I get lost if I take a detour.
I also might have dyscalulia? I also had little actual math education (story for another time, had severe educational neglect). I can't count back change to save my life, I struggle with basic arithmetic, I transpose numbers frequently. When I worked at a hotel I would often get a call over the radio to bring towels to a room and by the time I got to the floor I'd forgotten which room.
These disabilities are always present but they only come up situationally. I can work around them most of the time but they made it really difficult to find and keep employment back when I was well enough to work.