One day, when I was 7, my mother asked me : "Don't you have a voice in your head ?"
That's when I realized that I was different.
I never heard a voice in my head, when I was reading stories, there was no voice reading the story.
There was no movie inside my head.
I lived the book like a dream but even that isn't something one who doesn't have aphantasia can imagine because you have images, sounds, senses inside your head.
I don't.
I have a feeling about what's going on, I have descriptions about everything but even that is something I feel, like a sixth sense, maybe like Observation Haki in One Piece.
I don't have the words to describe this feeling because the words I always used until two weeks ago, when I discovered the word aphantasia, where words like I saw, I heard, words others are using and that I always thought to be a way of speaking because YOU DON'T TRULY SEE OR HEAR IN YOUR DREAMS AND YOUR MEMORIES...
So yes, I have aphantasia.
It's not something that you can heal from unless you obtained it after a commotion and even then I don't know if it can fix itself...
When I heard the word aphantasia, one of the main reasons to all my problems and struggles became crystal clear.
I had aphantasia.
I have problems memorizing maps, mind maps, diagrams...
I can't easily draw or paint something that isn't under my eyes...
When I speak another language than my mother tongue, I need some times to rediscover what the accent looks like.
I don't dream a lot either but when I dream, it's more intellectual.
There's a lot of emotions and I'm living my dream but without senses, I only what is happening and description of every actions and everything happening in my dream.
When I discovered aphantasia, I was like : I understand everything !
Don't think that aphantasia is a lack of imagination because every now and then I write
stories.
It's just that my imagination is more centered on details and feelings.
I have troubles 'seing' the big picture in my imagination because the descriptions (it's the only word I know to describe this sixth sense of mine) don't take everything, otherwise my brain would just explode I think.
It's like 'seing' a blury picture with descriptions about what's happening on the picture.
But even then, I can't see either the blury picture or read the descriptions, it's something I FEEL...
Since this discussion with my mother where she told me to try speaking in my head which I just couldn't...
... I created an artificial voice inside my head which is just me controlling my respiration to "hear" a voice in my head. I always thought my problem was just not having a voice but since there was still someone speaking... I could be like everyone else.
I even wondered if I truly was an homo sapiens so I decided when I was seven not to talk about it to anyone because I didn't want anyone to know that I may be a mutant...
When I say that aphantasia doesn't affect imagination...
With that artificial voice of mine, I could now read without talking aloud...
Yes aphatasia means struggle. Struggle just to keep up with everyone else and even then I feel I was lucky because when my mom saw I had trouble remembering things I saw or heard, she made me do a little game of hers :
There was a square with different geometrical forms of various colors inside it and I needed to be able to remember the way it was made.
Then my mom took the forms outside the square and asked it to remake it the way it was.
She made me do so for a few months with different dispositions each time.
I truly was struggling and I hated this game because my sister two years younger than me was making it seems easy by doing it again in a very short time each time we were made to "play" this game. (My sister has hyperphantasia, the opposite of aphantasia, she's able to hear sounds and picture images out of her imagination and in real life. Her dreams are in 3D and she doesn't have problems remembering images or sounds. Her problem is that it's some time too much... It's a help for her but even then there is a struggle..., she needs a lot of energy to use her brain and it's a struggle in itself... but then a lot of things are also easier for her...).
When I was a kid, I was sometimes jealous of her and I even thought of myself as dumb, especially when playong this particular game.
But even then I think that my mother making me play it is one of the best thing that happened to me, I was then able to memorize images, with difficulty and concentration but it became easier.
I just needed to remember everything in an order like a song with the lyrics where I am learning sentence after sentence and with description in my mind as for how it must sound.
When I was 12 years old, I was even able to memorize a map of every country in the world (I just learned a list of countries for every countinent in a certain order.
Thanks mom for making me play this game, I don't even dare to imagine what I would have become without it.
I recommend this game for everyone out there suffering from aphantasia.