#until i learned about aromanticism and aphantasia

[aro-culture-is]

aro culture is not realizing that everyone related or self-projected into romance in media, not just appreciating the relationship as a separate and fictional thing. (im arospec but yea, didnt know that ppl projected themselves onto the characters when they have a relationship what the heck. is that why there is so many unnecessary romance scenes?)

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[gostaks]

I happen to be both aromantic and aphantasic--that is to say I don’t experience romantic attraction and that I don’t have the ability to consciously visualize things. These two things aren’t particularly connected, I certainly don’t think that one affects the other, but they both end up in a similar place of “something I lack but don’t miss”

I grew up surrounded by the language of visualization. I was told to picture ideas, see things in my mind’s eye, or “watch a movie in my head” while reading. Until I was maybe 10 or 11, I assumed that they were just metaphors. My understanding of the world was that no one actually ‘saw’ things in their head. I figured that everyone, like me, could hold visual data in the forefront of their brain without ever actually ‘seeing’ the picture they were creating.

I remember clearly the first time I successfully visualized anything. I had drawn a picture of a horse in 5th grade art class, and I found that I could actually hold a version of the picture in my head. Not for long, mind you, maybe a second if I concentrated my focus on it and even then certainly not with the fidelity that actually looking at a thing would give me. Still, it was pretty much mind-blowing. For years, that drawing of a horse was the only thing I could visualize. 

Even as my brain developed very basic visualization, my “visual library” never really got all that big. I could picture, or maybe understand the concept of motion. I could capture very basic shapes or colors but never both at once. Much of what I call visualization now is actually at least partially kinaesthetic. I feel curves more than I see them and the more complex the sape the more it’s translated into motion or even proprioception (as if I was actually panning and moving through space)

As far as I know, even my new and more developed experience of visualization does not resemble what most people seem to call visualization. From more in-depth discussion, I’ve learned that some people do literally ‘see’ things in their heads while they read or think or have conversations. I’ve met people who can look at a room, close their eyes, and then count things within their visual memory of the space. Obviously there’s quite a bit of variation within people and their skills at visualization. I just happen to fall in a low percentile.

So, obviously, I know that I’m missing out on a fundamental part of some people’s human experience. From what I’ve heard, it can be a pretty nice one too. People use visualization to add depth to stories and link ideas and plan things out in their head in ways that I doubt I’ll ever have access to.

But that doesn’t mean I want to. From where I’m sitting, I get certain tradeoffs. For one, I have a good ear for noise. I can hear a voice and replicate it in my head, or do the same with music. As a kid I engaged in a lot of cognitive play around my... audialization? and now I have the ability to, for instance, play two songs over each other or sing two or even sometimes three part rounds inside my head (if you’re an auditory thinker I’d encourage you to try to play a round in your head, it’s a fun little exercise). It’s not the same as visualizing things, but in some ways I see it as a similar skill with a similar ability to link meanings and ideas.

The same goes, more or less, for aromanticism. I grew up thinking that the way I experienced the world was more or less within typical operating parameters. It really didn’t occur to me that romance was something that people actually spent time wanting. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the idea, I just had better things to do.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to recognize that my peers don’t have the same views of romance as I do. They enjoy it, even seek it out. On my end I have nothing more than an intellectual understanding of ‘what it’s hypothetically like’ and the little glimpses that my brain has afforded me of an alternate way of thinking about human relationships.

And, like the aphantasia, it really doesn’t bother me all that much. Sure, they’re parts of the human experience that I don’t have, but that hasn’t stopped me from living my life. The act of “seeing a movie in my head”, “marrying my one true love”, or “going skydiving without a parachute” can be neatly sorted into the box of “things I don’t anticipate ever doing or wanting to do”. They’re not holes in my life so much as places where, in another human, pieces could have been appended. It’s a bit like being a clay statue. Some people have more clay stuck on to form a jaw or hair or eyebrow ridges while others don’t. That doesn’t make the finished work any less whole or beautiful, just different. It’s just a different shaped kind of life, the kind that’s easier for me to feel than to picture in my mind.