This is the second entry in a series of posts examining the life of a neurodiverse child.
In the last blog post, we talked about facial blindness (prosopagnosia). I should clarify that “blindness” is a misnomer.
According to Cleveland Clinic: “Prosopagnosia (pro-so-pag-no-zee-ah) is a condition where your brain can’t recognize faces or facial expressions in spite of having normal vision. This can make it hard for you to recognize the faces of familiar coworkers, friends or even close loved ones.”
Many years ago, at a writing workshop at Rosemont College, I had the privilege of attending a talk by Heather Sellers, a Florida professor and writer, who has prosopagnosia. At the time, I thought, “Wow, that must be difficult,” but didn’t think much more about it until I started researching Flynn’s afflictions.
I am now reading her book, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, which details her issues with, among other things, facial blindness.
I also read her 2022 essay, “Who are you?”, published by The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science.
Until her thirties, Sellers did not know that other people could see and remember faces.
She could not fathom what was wrong with her.
“If you had told me then that most people recognized each other simply by looking at the other person’s face, I would not have believed you. It’s a fact, face recognition, and a theory and a process that present themselves to me to this day as essentially impossible to grasp, like quantum physics or reincarnation. Someone walks into a room, someone you are not expecting to see, and you know who they are—by their face?”
What was life like for Sellers when she was around Flynn’s age?
“All I have ever wanted is to go to school. I attempt to enter the classroom, to walk into the terror, to get to the other side of it, to join my fellow humans; but I can’t make myself step over the threshold. I’ve lost Julie-Becky-Amy. How to find them now in the busy, whirling classroom of so many children?
“Later that morning, someone walked me out to the parking lot. She asked, ‘Is that your mother?’ I could not bear to admit I did not know. When the woman in the cream-coloured station wagon motioned me over, grimace-smiling and calling apologies to the school office lady, I ran towards her even though I did not recognize her as mine, as known. I just knew that, although I was shaking with fear, I was supposed to go to that person, the designated stranger I was sent to and beckoned by. To do anything else would have been unthinkable.”
Just as Sellers cannot imagine recognizing a face, all of us “normal” people cannot possibly understand not being able to “see” a face.
“People often want to know what I see when I look at their face,” Sellers writes. “The question is coming from their perspective, and their experience of human faces comes from a radically different order of experience from mine. This isn’t a vision thing. It’s about an entire way of knowing not-knowing. I don’t think you are ever going to understand it. You’d have to un-know a thing you know automatically. It would be like learning to take in air without breathing.”
If this topic interests you, definitely check out Heather Seller’s writings.
The Q-View 