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   Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Mar-2025 23:36:30 JST Adrianna Tan

   I’ve been thinking about how having #aphantasia (inability to form images in my mind) has a relationship with how I process grief.

   For example, my beloved dog Cookie passed away in June last year. I grieved her of course, but I legitimately don’t think about her actively unless I look at a photo of her. She’s just not in my brain. Nothing really is.

   It’s an interesting way to perceive the world, differently from most of you.

   What is in my brain: ideas, words, concepts. I describe the way I think as ‘a wall of text that is floating by, I have to grasp at it to translate some chunk to the world’.

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Mar-2025 23:38:24 JST Adrianna Tan

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     When something floats by in the world outside my brain, for example when someone said orange and everyone at a meeting had a visual of something political, I did not. I was thankful for it. I had the concept of an orange, or the smell of it, but no visuals.

     I don’t have visual dreams. I have dreams relating to smell, sound, space (like the feeling of being in a crowded, smoky bar. That’s all vivid to me. But I don’t ‘see’ anything)

     That doesn’t mean my brain isn’t an overwhelming place. It’s just overwhelming in other ways.

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     Advanced Persistent Teapot (http_error_418@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Mar-2025 23:57:34 JST Advanced Persistent Teapot

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     @skinnylatte I'm at an odd sort of in-between point. My memory for visual things and situations seems to be so much less precise than most people's. I can picture a face, but it's fuzzy or floating in nothing, without context. I remember what was communicated in a conversation but not the words that were used. But I can play entire symphonies in my head. For instance, right now it's the William Tell Overture (and not the famous bit at the end that everyone knows, the middle section)