Word After Word

My dear friend T wants to know. She’s curious not confrontational. And I want to tell her. But I have no clue. I know I didn’t recognize her by her face. So how?

I recognize people all the time. I’m not sure how it works. I’m not sure when I am recognizing someone and I am not sure that I am getting it right. My version of recognizing a person is slow, awkward, nervous, unreliable. It’s like you are watching HDTV and I’m pressed up against a big old radio.

I am guessing. I work by ear, intuition, and motion analysis. I’m never sure. It’s messy and inexact and fascinating.

Here are some features of the face blind recognition process:

It’s much, much slower, I think, than your recognizing. Imagine a struggling reader, sounding the words out, aloud. That’s what it felt like, last night, at my book opening when I saw my friend T. (This is A’s term, “book opening,” which I love and am going employ frequently. My new poetry book is out, and last night we had a party to celebrate at an art gallery—a book opening! Lovely! But lots of people to miss, to know, to not know…hello…who are you…)

At the book opening, a woman came up and said “We should all be in nametags for you.” If she said who she was, I didn’t catch it. Then she said who she was, and I was shocked. She looked nothing like this person she claimed to be. Not even a little bit. But I had to believe her. I had to just roll with it. This is a feature of the face blind recognizing system: I’m surprised when I recognize someone; I’m equally as surprised when I don’t.

So then at the party, my dear friend P. said who she was. Which always seems unnecessary, and awkward and I feel weird about it, but it’s so great! This is what it is like when someone says who they are, even though it seems like I’m knowing them: I don’t have to do the work. It’s a crutch for my fusiform gyrus. A raft, a coupon, a cheat sheet—I can just dive into the interaction, I am spared the tentative guessing moments; it’s like you are working on a really hard long division problem (that would be any long division problem at all) and someone gives you the answer. (Thanks, P!) 

A note on P’s husband, M. I knew it was him because he was standing next to her in a way that husbands stand next to their wives at art openings or book openings. A gimme. But if he had just been standing alone in a corner, not next to her, I would have had no idea who he was. I would have seen a stranger. 

There’s a lot of faking. When someone smiles at me, I go with it. I am not sure at first who they are, but it usually becomes clear once they start speaking and moving and we are interacting. I know how people sound, how they gesture, and how they talk to me, what they say, how they just are reveals volumes. Stephen H has this way of imperceptibly bobbing—it’s slightly elfin, very adorable and that’s how I always know him. His signature gait. (My editor ED has a great gait signature, too. And my mom, Jake, and Mike the Bike guy. EZ.)

So, I think I was primed to recognize T and her husband because I caught them walking in: motion, gait. They don’t wear shoes that change their gait, T and her husband. Consistency is what the face blind person thrives on. Other reasons I recognized T and her husband last night at the party: he has very distinctive firm, declarative wise owl-type glasses, and a good clear outline (supremely tall person); she has distinctive hair (black telephone cords of gorgeousness) which if she doesn’t pull it back, is my main T. recognizing handle. And, I saw her first from the side (more telephone cords hair showing, less face). And, I knew to be expecting them. The stars aligned. I didn’t run up to her, but when a T-like person smiled at me in a really affectionate, I-know-you-well way, I felt about 84% confident this was my friend. All this happens in about a sixth of a second.

When two people are together, a couple, it’s easier. (However, at the opening, I recognized B but not his wife H.) But usually couples are much easier to identify than sole survivors. It’s like a dyslexic just assuming a phrase based on the first word. The spouse is a nice go-with, good guess.

But I think that the main thing that helped me recognize T on Friday night was she was wearing a blue polar fleece jacket that I myself have borrowed from her on two occasions when I got cold on a walk—I know that jacket and think of it as “my” T jacket. I’m fond of the jacket. It’s almost like she was in my jacket. 

So, I don’t know you by face, I don’t know you right away, I absolutely don’t know you for certain, and I don’t you know the same way you know me.

In most interactions, I roll with the “Hello” and let there be more space for more to come in after that—my brain doesn’t go “Tammy! Babe! So great to see you!”  That never happens.  My brain takes tentative steps in the direction of identification. “We’ve got a blue polar fleece jacket, a R-like husband, good hair samples, and a general moves-like-T incoming. Prepare for a T. greeting scenario! Check!” But I don’t launch the T greeting planes until after she speaks and I know for sure. 

I stay really open-minded until after we’ve started talking to each other. So often, I’m wrong. I have to stay in a place where I can change my mind instantly based on the information that’s streaming in.  (This seems like a really good thing for someone who is a writer.) I never run across rooms to greet people. They come to me and by the time we’re in the talking phase, I feel like somehow it’s going to work out. But I’m not ever certain. The students who came told me in advance they were coming, and in two cases, who they were coming with, so I employed my clumping-couples strategies. That’s how I got Anna W. I knew she’d be there and I knew with whom.

Last night is I was giving a reading so it was appropriate for me to stand around and people come up to me. That makes it easier. It gives me more time to gather the clues and get the appropriate response strategies lined up, fueled, and ready to launch.

But I spend evenings such as these very uncertain who is who. Some people are easier than others. Some people introduce themselves (Thank you Matt, John B, Katie—cute hat—and

Most of the time, I just pretend I know who is who and it either becomes clear, or it doesn’t. It’s easy to pretend. People don’t remember names so they aren’t expecting you to say their names. You can easily fake you know someone, just as you fake knowing their name. Faking is very, very draining. Before I “came out” as face blind, before I knew about the disorder, I faked entire conversations, long conversations. Long, long meaningful conversations. It horrifies me to remember this. I get flushed and sweaty thinking about it—I faked some important conversations. I kept thinking I’d get it, the clues would come in, but sometimes they never did. Now, I’m trying not to pretend. I am making myself ask.

Last night, when I was already well into the interaction, several times I asked people, when I caught myself faking, “Who are you?”

This is the art involved in being face blind: when to ask. I have to wait a certain amount of time to figure who a person is. When should I bag it, and just ask? When should I keep trying, using all my complicated strategies? What makes this so incredibly tricky is I do not know if I am talking to a stranger or a familiar person. I do not know if I am supposed to know.  (But I can tell a lot by how they act towards me.)

My whole life I’ve pretended I know who every one is. I never wanted anyone to know, ever, that I was not able to really do this. Again, it feels so much like being an adult dyslexic. All along, if anyone acted like they knew me, I acted like that back. It’s hard to stop doing that altogether. Nowadays, I’m trying to catch the exact moment when I’m past the point of info-gathering, and well into whole-hog faking. It’s an interesting place to notice what’s going on. I have to fake friendliness, knowing-ness, recognition, long enough to pull the person into my air space, so I can get the data I need. I can’t afford to act like everyone appears to be a stranger (though they do, at first, and sometimes for a long time). The way I recognize people is wholly based on the fact that I have to fake for a moment—like with T. I went with her smile, smiled back, trusting it would all be revealed, and it was. This is all very challenging and weird. 

Last night, a man came up to me all friendly and open and personal—I could sense he knew me well, and I would have figured it out when he and I exchanged words, but it was just so much quicker and easier for me that he was willing to say who he was. Before he reached me, he called out, “It’s John.” I didn’t have to work it out by long division, fuzzily partly erased by wondering. Thanks, John. Then, later, I recognized his wife: her perfume, and by now I was expecting her anyway. There is no possible way John came to my book opening under his own steam: he was brought there by his dear spouse, my J. Because of John, I already had her J. file open. So, I “recognized” John’s wife easily. Just not in the way you do.

My sense is you just walk about knowing who’s who. And face blind people have this incredibly intricate system set up in a control tower, with like forty guys working the phones, tacking up charts and pulling files with the history of everything we know about a person, their entire wardrobe, the movement analyses records….

At the restaurant next door to the gallery, before the opening, a woman and a man were at the table next to me—I didn’t think I knew them and wasn’t planning to speak. I’m sure I smiled and said hello, but I wasn’t working on it –wasn’t trying quickly to read the jacket? Shoes? Context? Couple outline? Plus they were not moving and so it was unlikely I’d get too far. The guys in the control tower took a coffee break. They were out back, smoking cigarettes. Then the woman said, “Hi Heather, it’s Lindsey” and I could see of course it is. The control tower guys flung themselves back into their stations and got really busy; we know Lindsey! We know Lindsey! But I didn’t recognize her date, was it her old boyfriend—was it a new guy? The old guy? Could be awkward, so I just pretended I knew him and just tried to act normal.  (Really, he looks like a whole new boyfriend but apparently he is not or else she is calling the new boyfriend by the old boyfriend’s name.)

Later, when we were all in the gallery, a stranger-woman was telling me I didn’t wear the dress from the poem, as I’d said I would and I had no idea who she was; then I remembered the conversation. She was the gallery manager. I didn’t recognize her. Nothing familiar in her movement, dress, or voice had helped me identify her. It will take more exposures. It was the content of her conversation I remembered.

When you see someone, you go by the face and you konw the whole person. I work by other parts—flimsy, loose, unreliable, interesting, complex moving parts.

Whenever someone asks me “how did you recognize me?” some part of me fears they don’t believe prosopagnosia is real. And, some of my friends, when I first told them I had it said to my face, “No, you do not have that.” Other face blind people have had the same experience. Their friends deny the

existence of the disorder.

It’s hard to understand recognition processes. I live in a very different model and I do not know exactly how to explain it because I can’t imagine what you get from a face that I do not—I can’t get my mind around what it is you see that I do not.

Faces look very, very similar to me. I’m recognizing you by everything about you that is not your face. There’s quite a lot to choose from; however, the stuff around your face changes a lot more than your face does. You do not, for example, match different noses to your outfits.

So, thanks for telling me who you are. I know it feels weird, and unnecessary. But it’s so relaxing for me to be certain and so rare. When you tell me who you are, it lets me focus on other things besides who the heck is this. Like how nice you are. How fun it is to be with you.