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Nov. 21st, 2013 07:52 pmA short while back, I said that I had some kind of sad thoughts about my experience with faceblindness that I was going to write about later. Here's later.
There are a couple of ways that my inability to recognize people has been affecting my sociality. The first is in failing to recognize people I regularly interact with at work. This is nothing new of course. I was at my last IT job for years and still commonly saw people in the building who I didn't recognize. The situation at the library at Parkside is much the same. There are two people I see every day who I recognize easily, due to a combination of familiarity and context. But there are other people who drop in from time to time who I should recognize but don't. That includes the library director. She, as something of a vintage food fanatic, actually cooked a bunch of post-war fare for a history class I was in that covered that period. She also gave Halloween treat bags to all the library staff. She's really thoughtful and nice, and I like her a lot! And, obviously, it's not like I don't know who she is. I remember my history of interactions with her.
But I haven't seen her in person enough times to know her by sight. I may have even talked to her a few times and not known it was her. This is even more the case for other library staff who I've had fewer personal interactions with. It's really hard to develop social connections with people that way. This felt particularly limiting during a library Halloween party and at a staff potluck that I attended. I'm getting better at telling people that I don't know who they are and not feeling embarrassed about it, but at events with lots of people around who I'll continue to fail at recognizing all through the course of the event, it's kind of draining to contemplate asking people who they are over and over. It leads me to tend toward keeping a little social distance and observing from the fringes.
I do explain the faceblindness to people. But it's outside of most people's experience, and I think many don't immediately grasp just how bad I am at remembering them. Even people I've explained the issue to may not realize how frequently and persistently I need to be reminded of their identities. For my part, I think I haven't been as good as I ought to be lately about stepping up to the situation by explaining and reminding. My coping mechanism was avoidance and shyness for the majority of my life, and as outgoing and extroverted as I've become, it's still easy to fall back to that sometimes. I'm going to try to do better.
The other situation that's caused a little angst for me is in my role as supplemental instructor. It's been a good experience, and when people tell me that I'm helping them learn difficult or complex things, it makes me feel really good about myself. My feelings, however, are seldom purely happy ones.
Most sessions I have between two and four people. I know that some of the people who are coming are the same people from session to session, and some are not. There's one person who I can always tell because of his ethnicity and facial hair. Other than him, attendees are usually girls who have no physical feature that allows me to tell them apart or remember who they are.
As an instructor, I'd like to know who my students are. I'd like to have a relationship beyond impersonal facilitation of discussion and answering of questions. It would be nice to be able to remember bits and pieces about them between sessions and create a positive, relaxed environment conducive to learning where people feel known and valued as individuals. Instead, it's a little like browsing a customizable website with cookies disabled. On each visit, you have to once again tell it all about yourself to work efficiently with it.
There are ways around these things. I manage. But they make me feel kind of isolated or disconnected. I want to more easily be a part of the social sphere around me. And it makes me think seriously about how well I'll be able to different kinds of fieldwork as a professional in the humanities.
I'm going to have tons of academic lit o read after this conference I think. I've needed to dive more deeply into that pool for a while, and having more time next semester will help. As I do so, I'm going to think about what I'm reading with an eye toward how appropriate to my personal limitations the field work I'm reading about is. Maybe that will even be a boon in my grad school search, helping me orient myself more solidly toward work that makes sense for me?
I'm feeling a little shy and reserved here at the conference this weekend, despite how much I'm enjoying the presentations. On Saturday, there's a grad school fair, and a networking event for applied anthropologists that my adviser suggested I go to. I'll remind myself that it's ok to explain to people that I may not recognize them when I see them again, remind myself not to let it bring my energy down, and hopefully meet some really cool people.
---
Another aspect of this, and one that's a little more under my ability to control, is my relationship with names. You may not know this, but I'm scared of addressing people by name. Fear is not an exaggeration for my feelings about this. It is, I think, another life-long defense mechanism. Since I was rarely sure of whom I was addressing, there was always a very good chance that I'd get their name wrong. Therefore, I didn't use names. It was, is, a way of keeping plausible deniability. I avoid name usage so stringently that I feel very significant mental discomfort at the idea of calling even my girlfriends by their names. I've been with Danae for four years. I've been involved with Lisa for less time, but have known her socially for rather longer. And still I simply do not call them casually by name. Sweetie, Love, Kitty, or other terms depending on person. But almost never just Danae or Lisa. It's as though names have a kind of power that is a little frightening. A little outside my control. If I'm not very careful, the power of those special words might turn on me.
I think it's because of this relationship with the concept of given names that it's very hard for me to remember other people's names. I instinctively treat names as irrelevant data and discard them. I think I unconsciously decide that, since I won't remember who someone is by sight anyway, and even if I did I wouldn't ever use their name, I don't need to remember the name, and so it gets discarded from storage. This is one aspect of my facial recognition issues that I think I might be able to change, and which I need to start addressing consciously and consistently.
---
Ok, off to the next lecture!
There are a couple of ways that my inability to recognize people has been affecting my sociality. The first is in failing to recognize people I regularly interact with at work. This is nothing new of course. I was at my last IT job for years and still commonly saw people in the building who I didn't recognize. The situation at the library at Parkside is much the same. There are two people I see every day who I recognize easily, due to a combination of familiarity and context. But there are other people who drop in from time to time who I should recognize but don't. That includes the library director. She, as something of a vintage food fanatic, actually cooked a bunch of post-war fare for a history class I was in that covered that period. She also gave Halloween treat bags to all the library staff. She's really thoughtful and nice, and I like her a lot! And, obviously, it's not like I don't know who she is. I remember my history of interactions with her.
But I haven't seen her in person enough times to know her by sight. I may have even talked to her a few times and not known it was her. This is even more the case for other library staff who I've had fewer personal interactions with. It's really hard to develop social connections with people that way. This felt particularly limiting during a library Halloween party and at a staff potluck that I attended. I'm getting better at telling people that I don't know who they are and not feeling embarrassed about it, but at events with lots of people around who I'll continue to fail at recognizing all through the course of the event, it's kind of draining to contemplate asking people who they are over and over. It leads me to tend toward keeping a little social distance and observing from the fringes.
I do explain the faceblindness to people. But it's outside of most people's experience, and I think many don't immediately grasp just how bad I am at remembering them. Even people I've explained the issue to may not realize how frequently and persistently I need to be reminded of their identities. For my part, I think I haven't been as good as I ought to be lately about stepping up to the situation by explaining and reminding. My coping mechanism was avoidance and shyness for the majority of my life, and as outgoing and extroverted as I've become, it's still easy to fall back to that sometimes. I'm going to try to do better.
The other situation that's caused a little angst for me is in my role as supplemental instructor. It's been a good experience, and when people tell me that I'm helping them learn difficult or complex things, it makes me feel really good about myself. My feelings, however, are seldom purely happy ones.
Most sessions I have between two and four people. I know that some of the people who are coming are the same people from session to session, and some are not. There's one person who I can always tell because of his ethnicity and facial hair. Other than him, attendees are usually girls who have no physical feature that allows me to tell them apart or remember who they are.
As an instructor, I'd like to know who my students are. I'd like to have a relationship beyond impersonal facilitation of discussion and answering of questions. It would be nice to be able to remember bits and pieces about them between sessions and create a positive, relaxed environment conducive to learning where people feel known and valued as individuals. Instead, it's a little like browsing a customizable website with cookies disabled. On each visit, you have to once again tell it all about yourself to work efficiently with it.
There are ways around these things. I manage. But they make me feel kind of isolated or disconnected. I want to more easily be a part of the social sphere around me. And it makes me think seriously about how well I'll be able to different kinds of fieldwork as a professional in the humanities.
I'm going to have tons of academic lit o read after this conference I think. I've needed to dive more deeply into that pool for a while, and having more time next semester will help. As I do so, I'm going to think about what I'm reading with an eye toward how appropriate to my personal limitations the field work I'm reading about is. Maybe that will even be a boon in my grad school search, helping me orient myself more solidly toward work that makes sense for me?
I'm feeling a little shy and reserved here at the conference this weekend, despite how much I'm enjoying the presentations. On Saturday, there's a grad school fair, and a networking event for applied anthropologists that my adviser suggested I go to. I'll remind myself that it's ok to explain to people that I may not recognize them when I see them again, remind myself not to let it bring my energy down, and hopefully meet some really cool people.
---
Another aspect of this, and one that's a little more under my ability to control, is my relationship with names. You may not know this, but I'm scared of addressing people by name. Fear is not an exaggeration for my feelings about this. It is, I think, another life-long defense mechanism. Since I was rarely sure of whom I was addressing, there was always a very good chance that I'd get their name wrong. Therefore, I didn't use names. It was, is, a way of keeping plausible deniability. I avoid name usage so stringently that I feel very significant mental discomfort at the idea of calling even my girlfriends by their names. I've been with Danae for four years. I've been involved with Lisa for less time, but have known her socially for rather longer. And still I simply do not call them casually by name. Sweetie, Love, Kitty, or other terms depending on person. But almost never just Danae or Lisa. It's as though names have a kind of power that is a little frightening. A little outside my control. If I'm not very careful, the power of those special words might turn on me.
I think it's because of this relationship with the concept of given names that it's very hard for me to remember other people's names. I instinctively treat names as irrelevant data and discard them. I think I unconsciously decide that, since I won't remember who someone is by sight anyway, and even if I did I wouldn't ever use their name, I don't need to remember the name, and so it gets discarded from storage. This is one aspect of my facial recognition issues that I think I might be able to change, and which I need to start addressing consciously and consistently.
---
Ok, off to the next lecture!
