Excerpt from my recently published book – Meeting in the middle of Nowhere, looking at the differences between someone with Aphantasia – my husband, and on the other side Hyperphantasia – Me.

‘Without the ability to plan out future scenarios, forethought and consequence are hampered in my view. Being able to plan one’s life seems like it would be much harder, could come across as quite haphazard to someone like me and ‘on the hop’ as it were.

My mother was this way, ‘a bit flighty’ we used to say. And if she hadn’t passed away, I would have a ton of questions for her about my theories on how she ended up the way she did. So I was strangely prepared for this type of living although I don’t enjoy it. Before my husband and I met, I had been living in the same town for about sixteen years, and only two different houses in the space of thirteen years. From being moved around all the time and having no roots in my childhood, all I wanted to do was settle down when I grew up. So I did.

He had also moved around a lot, but hadn’t ever wanted to settle. He didn’t feel the need to do the same thing every day, didn’t want to see the same people and talk about the same old crap. He doesn’t do small talk and general chit chat just to pass the time, even with me. I would say he is an adventurer. He wants to experience life and be there, because without that, life really is boring. He can’t imagine being somewhere, he can’t ‘switch off’ and go into fantasy land, and he can’t sit there and mentally time travel to pass the time or rethink things. So he takes enjoyment from things as they happen.

I have a lot of hobbies, I needed lots of mental stimulation growing up and found reading, writing, drawing, movies, embroidery, cooking, cleaning and anything that I could find to occupy my brain. I feel like I accidentally experienced life because I just happened to be there and through other people and opportunities. All of it took mental planning and visualising, all my pastimes, all my career choices and ambitions. If I don’t think about them in advance, I don’t get geared up to do them. My motivation sometimes needs motivating.

He doesn’t have any mental pictures to inspire him and with this, boredom took on a whole new meaning to me. I understood why he seemed agitated and bored a lot, because he genuinely is. There is no forethought happening to plan tasks or time filling activities. And it’s a vicious circle, bored because you aren’t doing anything, but literally can’t think of anything to do. Travel seems to be the thing for him, getting there is part of the adventure and then being somewhere, doing something. It’s live and happening. So we have had to find a way to work with both. So that I don’t feel completely unsettled by never knowing what’s coming next. I need time to mentally prepare for things, and so he doesn’t feel like his life is Groundhog Day. It’s easy to say ‘find something to do’ but this doesn’t strike me as an easy task for him. Hell, it’s sometimes not an easy task for me and I have a million and one things going through my head to do.

Another classic saying springs to mind for this chapter ‘Look before you leap’. This for me has always been associated with thinking ahead and for awareness of consequence.

But within an awareness of consequence must be a fear of it too surely? If there is no fear of the consequence because it is not happening, then why would you hold yourself back? I don’t think you would for some people, but you wouldn’t really know why. On the other hand, having an awareness of the repercussion and fear of it does not automatically mean it can be averted either. I have found a classic example of forethought and consequence causing two quite avoidable injuries I sustained in childhood.

Example: I was about seven or eight years old and I had a push bike. A Raleigh BMX to be precise, red and white. I loved it and would blat to the shops or down to my friend’s house, no problems. On this one particular day, I was biking to what we called ‘the 10 0’clock shop’ – probably no mystery as to why. Running parallel to the very straight main road, was a side road with a row of houses, but was steeply dipped coming up at the shop. So I decided to take the dipped road, with the intention of peddling as fast as I could down, so that it wasn’t such a hard slog up if you got some momentum behind you. Sounded like a solid plan, and it was.

Until for what would appear to be no reason at all (I now suspect Hyperphantasia) I started to wonder if what I had been told was true. Does your front wheel buckle if you let go of your handlebars while going really fast? Now, you may think this thought might have just been dismissed and I continued on my speedy way. No such luck. I wanted to know. Had to know if my imaginings of it all going horrible wrong were correct. So, I let go. And true to the information I had been given and had imagined, my front wheel buckled. I flew over the front of the bike and fell face first onto the concrete.

I really hadn’t given enough thought to what would happen next in a physical sense. What did happen was a lot of pain, a fair amount of blood, some smashed in front teeth with one completely missing. And luckily a random lady coming out of one of the houses to help patch me up. I felt stupid, I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t really sure what it was that had made me do it, I had put logic to one side and just went for it. It scared me a bit when I started to understand what I was capable to doing to myself. We are very breakable, and I guess as children it can be a hard time learning that however your brain works.

Example: Around the same time in my life, we had three dogs. One of them in particular had an issue with things coming through the letterbox. Anything that came through was, for want of a better word, savaged. So, again, in my ridiculous childhood thought process, wondered. Could it be possible, that if I put my hand through the letterbox, it will get treated with the same contempt? The answer is yes, but only temporarily. In the dogs defense, as soon as he realised it was my hand, he let go. Unfortunately his tooth had punctured one of my fingers, there was screaming and lots of blood. A few stitches in my index finger and I was fine, but started to see a pattern forming. I didn’t trust what I was told or even my own thoughts and felt the need to prove these things, even at great cost to myself. It was here I think I first started to understand about instinct and how you are just going to have work out some things for yourself. Where others may be giving you really sound advice, take heed. That does not mean take the advice, but keep it in mind.’

 

(c) K Wicks