Sunday's Snapshots: Do workarounds work?

A friend of mine has a condition, prosopagnosia, wherein he doesn’t recognize faces. He can meet me ten times, and every time is the first time. Not really, he’s begun to recognize my voice, he remembers my name and connects it to my voice, he’s begun putting things together like the way I smell (assuming I don’t change laundry detergent, start wearing perfume, etc.), he’s begun to “recognize” me because he runs into me at the same place every time we meet and I don’t change any other outward clues about who I am.

His wife can change her hair style and/or color, and he won’t recognize her. If she were in a disfiguring accident that chopped off her nose, but her hair remained the same, he’d know just who she was. It's the face he is blind to despite perfect vision and a brilliant mind.

I joke that I have this same problem, even though I simply can’t remember people from one place to another. If I meet you at the library and then see you at the dollar store, I’ll recognize your face but have no idea why. It won’t matter that we’ve spoken dozens of times at the library, the fact that we are now somewhere else, means I can’t place how I know you. And it’s not until we’ve run into one another multiple times in multiple places that I begin to place you quickly and put your name with your face. But if I haven’t seen you in months, it’s like starting all over again.

At the rodeo this past season, we sat directly next to someone I’ve known for a couple of years but have only ever run into at his home or the Elks and not for several months. He greeted me by name, and I knew I knew him, but I couldn’t figure out how. Once he said his name, it all flowed in with a whoosh, but I still felt terrible. The issue isn’t that he isn’t memorable, it’s that my memory struggles to place him out of situational context.

The other day at the Ainsworth Fall Forest Festival, I saw a woman I knew from soccer, or thought I did, but I couldn’t be sure. There weren’t two kids or a husband with her, and I couldn’t be confident it was really her; we’d only ever met one another on the soccer field. I debated walking by, to see if she’d say hi first, hearing her voice would help me be sure, but I was already exhausted by all the people, stupored by the sunshine and a fabulous bbq meal. I considered texting, “is that you over there?” with a smiley face, but didn’t have my phone.

All my helpful workarounds were unavailable.

Oliver Sacks, the brilliant neurologist and author, wrote about face blindness in his fantastic book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The author himself suffered from the disease. As it only affects 2% of the population (and is much more serious than my situational failing to connect the dots), I can only assume I don’t have it. However, this sort of situational-face-blindness I suffer from seems to be quite common. The more vocal I am about how it works for me, how embarrassing and awkward it is, the more people around me admit to the same thing.

If it is something that so many struggle with, why is it something we’re so embarrassed about? Is it possible that prosopagnosia affects more people than we’re aware of because sufferers are too ashamed to say anything, or think it’s simply how everyone functions?

Jane Lynch, the actress, is deaf in one ear but didn’t realize it until she was seven years old; she thought everyone only heard out of one ear. Jennifer Aniston, the actress, didn’t realize she had dyslexia until she was 25, she just thought she wasn’t smart; Cher was diagnosed at 30. If you don’t know there’s anything “wrong” or if whatever’s “wrong” is embarrassing, you may never know there are ways to live better with what you’re struggling with, and statistics are incorrectly skewed due to unreported cases.

What sorts of things do you work around in your daily life? Are they things you do simply because they make your life easier, like putting your keys on the hook when you walk in the door so you always know where they are; or are they more complicated, like always introducing yourself to people so they’ll remind you of who they are (a trick I’ve considered but haven’t begun to implement…yet)? Do your workarounds work, or are they cover for a more complicated issue?

Sunday Dutro is an internationally published writer living in Thompson Falls with her beautiful family. Reach her at [email protected].