I suspect that I am someone who has aphantasia (inability to visualise stuff) and it’s weird, because I only relatively recently realised that it was a thing that I likely had. I knew it was a thing in general much before this, but it didn’t occur to me that it could apply to me, because surely that isn’t just something you can just not notice about yourself. It turns out that yeah, actually, it can be something you don’t notice, because if you’ve lived that way your entire life, you have nothing to compare against.

As a comparison, I am autistic and struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, as many autistic people do. Loud sounds and bright lights literally hurt me, and for a large chunk of my life, I didn’t realise that I was literally experiencing the world differently to other people; I thought that everyone felt this discomfort, but I was the only one making a fuss out of it. It really blew my mind when I was diagnosed as a teenager and realised that not only was I experiencing stuff that most people weren’t, that there may well be countless other ways in which my fundamental perceptions and cognition could be different, and I’d have no way of knowing.

Shit’s trippy as hell.