There's something that happens a lot with me... I hear of a personality trait that people with autism have and I think "I have that - I've had it all my life." Then I read or hear a little more about it and realise that I've got a comparatively mild form of it. I seem to have a very broad spectrum of the characteristics - like most of them have some sort of hold on me - but not to an absolutely crippling degree.
Today, I read about something called Agnosia - or face blindness. And I've definitely experienced that.
I went to a lot of different schools when I was young, because my parents moved around a lot. But I could never recognise more than about three or four of the other kids. And they were either particularly distinctive, or they were the kids that I'd be wary of. The ones who would pick on me, for example.
I used to dread being picked to hand out the jotters, because that meant matching up every name on the jotter to a specific person - something I was completely incapable of doing. It simply wasn't an option to admit that I just didn't know who my classmates were, if I'd been sharing a classroom with them for the last six months or so. But occasionally it got highlighted, because there was just no hiding it.
One time, the teacher asked me to hand something to Jane. And I looked round the room in confusion, trying to remember who Jane was - and the entire classroom looked at me expectantly. My hesitation and confusion was instantly clear to everyone. And I froze. Panic set in.
"Give it to Jane," the teacher repeated. More slowly this time. Like she was talking to an exceptionally slow pupil. And I cringed.
The thing is, that this condition was bad enough with the boys - but for some reason, it was even worse with the girls. I still can recognise men more easily than women. Not by a huge degree, but enough to be noticeable.
It became obvious to everyone very quickly that I didn't know who Jane was. Which meant that a social difficulty that I went to great pains to conceal was suddenly revealed to the entire room. It was a horrible moment. And this bitch of a teacher could have made things easier on me, but she chose instead to highlight the difficulty and make it even worse.
"Point to Jane," she said.
I chose a girl at random and hesitantly pointed to her. I was wrong. The class spewed out their amused and incredulous contempt for my mistake. This was great sport. Their day was truly being brightened by this unexpected turn of events.
"Point to Michelle," the teacher said.
I pointed again. I was wrong again.
"Point to..." And this went on a bunch of other times, until I was reduced to this cringing, flinching kid - standing slumped at the front of the classroom, wishing I could just disappear and be spared this humiliation. But the teacher wasn't done.
"I've been teaching here for just a few weeks now, and remember the names of everybody," she said. And to demonstrate her skill, she pointed at and named half a dozen of the kids right there on the spot. "Why don't you know anyone's names?"
I had no answer to that, but she demanded one. It wasn't a rhetorical question. So now I was a cringing, flinching kid muttering "don't know" very quietly at every question. And she kept demanding that I "speak up".
This, by the way, was the same teacher who called my "Dozey" one morning, because I didn't realise she was talking to me - a nickname that stuck with me for the rest of my time at that school.
Anyway... earlier today, I heard of a condition called Agnosia - face blindness - and I realised that's what I have. If I'm introduced to too many people at once, I won't remember the names and faces of any of them.
If I meet you (whoever you might be) in a pub, and have a great conversation with you for the next three hours, I might not recognise you tomorrow, if I meet you in the same pub the following day. It's not my greatest difficulty, if the setting is the same and if I expect to meet you again. But I may subtly scrutinise other people - even people who might look substantially different to you - before I discard them. It takes me a while to build up a template of features and quirks that will help me to recognise you without difficulty. This is bad enough if you're on your own when I first meet you, but much, much worse if you're part of a group of people.
The setting is very important. I might meet you a dozen times or a hundred times in the same place, but not recognise you if I meet you in a different place - because you're out of context. You're not in the place that I expect you to be in.
I don't know how many times I've got into conversations with someone I've encountered randomly - some person who is a stranger to me, but who knows who I am. And I'll talk about various other mutual acquaintances, without having a clue who most of those people are. And I'll see the occasional moments of confusion in their eyes, where I don't respond quite the way I'm expected to, because I'm desperately trying to fill in all the blanks, figure out who this person is and pretend that I'm keeping on top of the conversation.
It affects how I watch TV, too. Any series that has too many characters introduced in too short a space of time can be troublesome. I really struggle with anything to do with the mafia, because there's also the problem of individual loyalties and rivalries to factor in to the interaction. I've given up on such varying series as The Sopranos as a result of that - despite having watched the entire first series and a substantial part of the second, purely because enough people told me it was good and I felt I was missing out on something. Eventually, I just came to terms with the fact that it wasn't good enough to make me keep trying.
Game of thrones was a tricky one, but thankfully the characters are very distinctive and very diverse. I've had to watch every episode twice and read a synopsis of each one, just so I can be sure I've got it. I think a lot of people have had similar problems with that series, though, because it's so densely plotted. If I hadn't been so fascinated by the concept, though, I might not even have attempted it.
The most difficult one was also one I kept going with, purely because I liked it so much. It was the reinvented Battlestar Galactica. In this case, a couple of the younger cast members were too similar for me to easily distinguish - most specifically, Anders and Apollo. I think a large chunk of the difficulty lay in the fact that the characters had to wear the uniforms and have their hair cut short, so there were fewer distinguishing characteristics. Unusually, I had more difficulty separating the male characters from each other. Normally it's female characters who blur together for me, but this time round the primary ones were much more distinctive. I was never, for example, going to confuse Starbuck with Boomer. The concept was further complicated by the "human" Cylons in the series - there were identical models who had had different experiences that had either scarred or moulded them in different ways. There were times where I got particularly confused about the subtexts of a particular scene, or what a specific bit of interaction actually meant. This was only partially due to the face blindness, but that was definitely an element of the confusion.
In essence, the more generic a group of people tend to be, the more I struggle with them. For a while, I thought I had grown better - that I had learned to cope with the difficulties. But I realise that while I may have developed strategies and mechanisms as I grew older, the earlier difficulties were stronger, because they involved my peer group - which was obviously composed of other children. I still struggle to separate children's faces from each other.
Like a lot of my own personal autistic characteristics, I don't have face agnosia too overwhelmingly strongly - but it's definitely there. But it's good to know there's a word for it. Which means that in the future, perhaps I'll just say "I'm sorry, but I have Agnosia... who are you?"
