The Whispering Grass

sanmarcopress:

I’ve lived in thirty-five different places in my life.

I’m an ex-Air Force Brat, and living in temporary quarters and moving about so much—especially as a child—led to a constant stream of new schools, friends, new rules and situations.

But how I viewed my experiences as a military…

I’m reblogging this because more people should know about prosopagnosia. I identify a lot with this post: I too moved around a lot as a child, I used to put my inability to recognise people down to always being new and having to deal with encountering a lot of new people. I’ve never had the problem recognising myself, but a lot of other things here are spot on for me.

When I was at school, I dreaded being selected to hand out books of work to people. I’d look at the name on the book/work/whatever it was, and out at the class full of identical people in school uniforms, and panic. Some people I would know by remembering their seat. Sometimes I’d get it wrong completely and get funny looks. I wish now I’d tried to explain the problem to the teacher. I just thought I was absent minded or forgetful in some way that is in the normal bounds.

I have people get irritated at me for not using their name in conversation, and half the time it will be because I wasn’t entirely sure who I was speaking to right away. I’ve acted over familiar with strangers in the street (normally people wanting money/my phone number) who have approached me as if they know me, because I presume that they must be someone I’ve met before. I have some trouble following TV shows, in particular mystery shows with lots of characters. If any of you have seen Sherlock, reveal of the identity of Jim from IT was totally lost on me! I also had to ask my friend after seeing the enitre series, “Is Mycroft Mark Gatiss? He sounds like Mark Gatiss.” I think the number of people who I try to socialise with is smaller because of this problem too.

I focus a lot on voice and accent, style of clothes, setting. In a way, it makes me very observant. All those pointers tend to be really useful for most situations, it’s actually very rarely I’ll be totally confused for long.

It occurs to me that I should probably tell more people about this. I only tend to tell close friends about it, but of course by that time I know them well enough to recognise them right away. It’s just an awkward thing to slip into conversation. Perhaps I should try just slipping it in when saying goodbye to people.