It’s been a strange road learning about Hyperphantasia. How imagination, memory and thought processes can all work together – or against each other. What always used to just be called an overactive or hyper imagination, really isn’t. It is sometimes a struggle to focus on external stimuli and take it all in, as there is so much going on internally. But this does not equate to ‘not being in reality’ as seen from an Aphantasic point of view. It took me a while to explain to my Aphantasic husband that everyone has their own version of reality anyway. He finds that a weird concept. He said you are either in reality or not. I disagreed and continue to try and explain this very strange thing. From a combination of interpretation, personal ideals, identity and environment we have to build our own realities around us within the parameters of what I guess is defined as a shared reality. And when this comes into disagreement or conflict with other peoples realities, it can be a confusing thing and doesn’t always work out.
He really doesn’t understand what it is like to have a constant murmur and a factory processing everything all the time in my head. Any more than I understand what it is like to see and hear nothing in mind, and when there is nothing happening, there really is nothing happening. I learn to manage the barrage of images and memories. Understand all the triggers and tendencies that I have to ‘keep’ things in mind. I guess almost like a hoarder of thoughts, but not by choice. Within that I realised though, that to a point I do have a choice, because I can choose (mostly) what goes in. Every article, book, film, conversation, theory, experience, idea and thought is jumbling around in mind, waiting to pounce anytime, anywhere for whatever reason. A lifetime of input increasing all the time and since the internet happened, ever growing. It has definitely changed my view on what I watch, read or give my time to.
But it is still a learning process, wondering how and why you are the way you are. Is it natural, was it environment? The old nature vs nurture argument which has been of interest to me for some time…
(c) K Wicks
Here is my book about discovering we had Hyperphantasia and Aphantasia and how I feel it affects certain aspects of life.
A funny but slightly weird moment from my past (there are many). My grandpas 80th birthday just over a decade ago and I was 28 at the time. A party of about 20-30 or so people were invited, mostly people I didn’t know apart from a few relatives. The seating was all prepared, Grandma had decided to put me next to an old friend who worked in recruitment, because I had too. I guess she thought it would give us something to talk about. That friend of theirs however, went straight in with a different line of questioning I was not expecting. He asked about my parent, thinking it was my uncle but obviously realised it possibly wasn’t to ask about it, when I confirmed he wasn’t, he was shocked and slightly confused. I had to say that my father was the youngest son. None of these friends knew about the second son it turns out. The conversation didn’t get noticed round the table, but I suspect it was probably talked about after when he went home! It was an odd feeling to have to explain myself and where I fit in the family, but it was also strange to know their friends didn’t know they had a second son. If you just don’t tell people, they don’t know, and by this right, they had removed the rogue element in their story.
Fiction is pointless. What do you think when you hear those words? Do you agree? Have you ever given thought to why fiction is a thing? I am a writer and horror fiction is my chosen genre (or rather I think it chose me). So I was disturbed to hear these words, from someone close to me at the time. Not when we first met, he just said he wasn’t into reading fiction and we left it at that. But a couple of years later, I was curious and wanted to know, why didn’t he like reading fiction?
The answer threw me completely. Fiction is pointless. I have to confess, I believe I took the defensive route immediately. As someone who has enjoyed many hours of escapism growing up immersing myself in books and movies and writing my own stories. I thought it was essential and it had never dawned on me that other people may not share that. I think I unpicked that jumper thread because I knew my husband would never read my books or be interested in any of my fiction, I wanted further explanation. I didn’t quite realise the can of worms it was going to open.
I tried so hard to explain it, what joy fiction could bring letting your imagination run riot as they say. He shook his head at me. Then I worked out something vaguely in the back of my mind. When talking about stuff previously I had asked him about playing as a child and imagining things and he said the phrase which was starting to make more sense ‘I could never go full cartoon’ like everyone else. I didn’t quite understand it, but couldn’t think of a way to get him to describe it better at the time, but now it came back to me. I had it, and said ‘when I read books, I actually see what I am reading in my head, there are pictures of what’s going on. Like a movie’.
And that was it. What seemed like such a small thing as one person liking fiction and the other not, uncovered something very profoundly different and something that would affect nearly every aspect of our lives thereafter. We discovered he has Aphantasia, a lack of visual imagery in mind. He didn’t see pictures in his head, and to be honest, was pretty horrified that I did. And it turned out apparently 98% of people do in some way or another as well. The adjustment to this has been long and sometimes not easy. It’s made me analyse my own thought process all over again too, because as it turns out, I have Hyperphantasia, which is considered an over active and vivid imagination. Now I know other people aren’t like me either, they don’t have constant dialogue, pictures, songs, films, memories and ideas all jostling for position at once in mind. It’s been a strange old road, and this year has just made it all the stranger…
But still there was this fear I couldn’t shake, I had determination, ambition, motivation, frustration but ultimately a strange fear that followed me through. Through all the changes, all the decisions, all the experiences, a dulling, numbing fear that controlled everything. A fear of dying that stops you living.
Were we meant to understand mortality? Is that what drives us to be more? Or is it why we live in denial of it, scared to face what is coming to us all, to live not despite it, but because of it. Because we are given the chance to know that it will end, to make of it what we can while we can.
Time is a strange thing, chasing us all yet stretching on forever before us, and oddly as I get older, there is less fear. It is what it is, I cannot change the defined parameters of time or death, so am at the mercy of them whether I like it or not. Instead of being haunted or followed by them, I have decided they can accompany me on this journey of strangeness, which is now a little less lonely.
They can never really quite factor in all the variables. Despite the determined consistencies, there will always be the ‘rogue element’ that persists in disrupting the perceived outcome.
Be the rogue element, not a determined consistency.
I have been seeing the word stress used more and more on social media. And rightly so, people are watching their lives and futures being destroyed, not by an illness, but by people. In the beginning back in March, I knew this would be a tough road. Not everyone has experienced high levels of stress, and most certainly won’t have experience in dealing with what is going on now. Nothing like this has ever happened, so how are we meant to have coping mechanisms already in place to help? And while under so much stress, how do you develop them?
I can only use personal experience to try and help myself through this and wonder how everyone else is actually coping. As weird as it sounds, I feel as though my early life was now training, it seemed so confusing at the time and has taken me years to come to terms with it all. But the feelings have been brought back by recent events of lockdown and what has followed.
I’ll explain as best I can. My mother was, picking my words carefully here, controlling, manipulative and selfish. She told many lies for her own gain and controlled everyone in the immediate family through what seemed like clever tactics at the time. Keeping everyone just separate enough so that we wouldn’t discuss it all and find out the truth. We moved house every couple of years and just before I was 10, she married a squaddie and we were shipped of to Germany. To put it all into context for you of what she was really like – I didn’t know she had got married for a third time. I found the wedding photos on her bedroom dresser one day and I asked what they were and who was in the picture with her. The response was “Oh, I got married last week and we are moving to Germany in 3 weeks”.
That is how my life started to be derailed and the type of person I was dealing with to bring me up. I did not know at that point that she had also walked out on us all for a few years when I was very young, my selective amnesia was in play as I understand it now. I look back and realise I had to develop coping mechanisms early for certain things. Germany was ok, I made friends and stuff and got on in school. But I feel like a part of me was left behind, almost as if everything thereafter was an out of body experience. I was present and taking part, but part of me wasn’t. I do wonder now if being hyperphantasic may have added to this strangeness in mind. And the fact that no-one else knew. They didn’t know how much I would be thinking of things, imagining them, projecting future thoughts. It made me feel very separated an awful lot, not lonely, because to be fair, I can replay so much in mind you can make people up if you want to. Not imaginary friends, but imaginary scenarios with people. This is how I prepared myself for life, because nothing else was preparing me. After a year and a half in Germany we were posted back to the UK. Two years here, then posted to Cyprus. Then back to the UK ending up in County Durham, all by the age of 14. Very different from the down south UK I was used to.
My mother also had health issues, which were also used to get what she wanted. At the time it just seemed like someone who was unlucky, was making the best of what they had. Even I thought that, she had me fooled for years too. My older siblings knew more of the truth than I did, so I was easier to ‘work’ on than they were. I was quite trusting of my family and gullible. She tried to convince me I had health ailments as I became a teenager and seemed to want to have a companion with it all (you know what they say, misery loves company!). I could feel the apron strings getting tighter and tighter. But after all the moving and weird family shit that had happened, and ending up in an completely unfamiliar place, I became unstuck mentally. Had a bit of a breakdown they said, clinically depressed and with behavioural issues.
For the first six months, I did not leave the house after developing agoraphobia on top of it all. Then I was bribed, or rather my mother came up with a compromise, she said if she got a dog, would I go out? Of course I said. (We had given up our three family dogs to go into the army life and I was gutted at the time). Took a little while, but we did get a couple of dogs, and I did make the effort to go out. I also set myself small tasks each week of going to the library so I had something to focus on. I loved to read and needed books to keep me occupied. Pocket money wasn’t enough for my reading appetite back then. I still had my anxiety pretty much everyday for years, I just got used to it and decided to go with the saying – Feel the fear and do it anyway. I couldn’t go to school so I had a state supplied home tutor for 3 hours per week as I couldn’t cope with the mainstream curriculum anymore. Before I was due to do exams I turned 16 and my tutor informed me that my compulsory education was now over and I could officially leave if I wanted to and not do exams (which to be honest were freaking me out). I was delighted and instantly dropped out, but was also devastated and believed I had ruined my whole life already. I believed the lie that if you don’t get a formal education you can’t do well in life, and that lie came from my grandparents – who funnily enough both went to university. But at the time I felt I had set myself up for failure from just 16 years old. So I started trying to get jobs and despite having depression, anxiety, full blown psoriasis from stress and migraines – I still put myself out there and tried to take part in life. I had no friends to socialise with even if i had wanted to and couldn’t just walk into shops or places without having a quiet panic attack.
After four years of trying to get myself back on track to just be able to be vaguely normal, a tragedy struck two weeks before my 18th birthday. My mother, who’s behaviour had recently become quite erratic and strange, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. So whatever I thought my life was going to be like, changed from that point. Any plans I might have had or decisions I thought I was wrestling with, were all gone. Instantly replaced by a new set of issues and a new future that was not of my choice or my making. I left home five weeks after my birthday, moved to a county where I had no family but one old family friend and tried to make a life for myself. It was stressful, there is no other word for it. That’s the short version of those events, there was a lot more to it and within it, and maybe one I will be able to write it all.
Having the rug pulled out from under you and the goalposts changed at every hurdle is stressful. Never knowing where you are or what is going to happen next, is stressful. And your health being used as a weapon of control, is stressful. All these things have been recently triggered again in my mind by the events happening around the country. They seem oddly familiar, the tricks of someone/something that is not being honest, has an ulterior motive and is entirely self-serving. And despite what they say, don’t have your best interests at heart. I can only hope that other people are finding ways to cope and are developing the mental strategies needed to understand what is happening and the long term effects that it will undoubtedly have, on us all.
We found ourselves in the middle of the biggest disaster of living memory. But within that disaster a plot began to unfold. We were being used as weapons against each other during what initially appeared to be a terrible new illness. There was a silent invisible enemy, one you could not quantify or calculate, but one they told you was there. The government told you, the media told you, even the doctors told you. Why would they all lie you asked yourself?
For years the people had wanted looking after. For years they have begged the government for more rules, more surveillance, more punishment, more control. In times of uncertainty they looked to them for safety, guidance and support. Not each other. Work and life moved people further away from each other, and communities split apart and fell. No-one was looking out for each other anymore. Every man for himself was the new way. This was not an accident.
We might wonder why the ‘people’ look to the government for answers, assistance and to hold their hand, because that is the way they wanted it to be. But they needed everyone on board, so they took away all you have worked hard for or wanted to have. They made us sit while our futures slipped away, made us watch it slowly crumble. They knew we would comply, they planted enough fear to make it so. But what could we do, they had politicians, the police, the army and all the medical personnel on their side being fed from the same trough.
