This week I am working on writing a feature article
on Face-Blindness for a writing class that I am currently taking this semester. Our assignment was to first pick our topic,
which I have, and before writing research pictures to enhance our article. Easy
peasy.
The Unexpected – What I learned about me
I guess I learn something new about myself every
day. This can be excited, frightening, confusing, and almost all the time
frustrating. Searching for pictures related to my essay topic was no exception.
I have been practicing searching for pictures to
correspond with topics for a while now, and have been incorporating photos into
my blog posts. So for me this assignment was simple. I went to Wikipedia
commons (looking for photos that I can use with creative commons licenses),
then I searched Google imagines.
Many great photos appeared on my screen. This is
the first time I hunted photos BEFORE writing, and it had an interesting and
unexpected outcome.
As I mentioned, my topic is face-blindness. People
with autism often suffer from face-blindness ranging from slight to severe.
Face blindness can cause you not to recognize people even when you have
interacted with them before, sometimes even if you have seen them every day at
work.
If you take the person out of context (out of
uniform, see your son's teacher in the supermarket instead of in school, etc.)
those who are "face-blind" will not recognize that person. This
explains how I was able to work with people every day (who wore uniforms), and
still not recognize them on the streets.
And I mean—not at all! Learning about Face-Blindness after my diagnosis
put many experiences in my life in perspective.
Back
to the Pictures
Several really cool pictures caught my eye, and I
snatched them up for this week's assignment. What I did not expect was to learn
something about myself from the pictures. There was one picture.... It is a
girl holding a sign that says, "I am not ignoring you on
purpose."
That photo slapped me in the face and left me
staring blankly at my computer screen. I had never considered that when I don't
recognize people who are familiar with me, that they may think I am just
ignoring them!
The discovery of this picture illustrated my
"mind-blindness." I too often lately realize how much never crosses
my mind. I would have never/and never have before thought that someone would
think I was intentionally ignoring them.
I know that it sounds silly, and now that I think
about it I feel silly--because it makes sense. If you didn't know that I
struggled with face-blindness, and I walked past you in the supermarket
oblivious, you may think that I was ignoring you ON PURPOSE.
My picture hunt gave me clarity and insight—an
insight that I likely would not have had, nor expressed in my written article
had I wrote FIRST. So thank you to my professor for this assignment; it
highlighted my mind-blindness.
Everything I see lately reminds me of how Mind Blind I can be.
The thing that is disturbing me lately though is
that it seems I am discovering more and more how truly mind-blind I am. It is a
hard discovery and I have often been stunned at my, what now feels like,
ignorance. I always thought I read
people well, I thought I was intuitive, I thought I was brilliant, and there
was just something wrong with the rest of the world! Ok—many times I still think that.
This is the first of a series of posts that I am
going to begin; the “What I Learned About Me Today” series, because it seems I
am continuing learning something new and often stunning (to me).
