Ever since 5th grade, there hasn’t been a free second I haven’t spent with my head down in a book, or on my Kindle immersing myself in a new story. While I’ve explored many genres over the years, nothing has ever stuck with me like a good romance. I always find myself yearning for a book that will make me think, “A few more minutes wouldn’t hurt,” when I really should be going to sleep. However, it wasn’t until recently that I realized that the way I enjoy these books is much different than many of my peers.
My love for reading has always stemmed from the way books make me feel. I always feel more in tune with my emotions when I have connected myself to the character I am reading about at that moment. It’s as though I’ve become a part of the book; I feel as though I am experiencing the plot in real time right alongside the characters.
While I’m sure this is not a completely unique experience, my connection with books goes against another aspect of my brain that I did not understand was different than others until recently. For most of my life, it did not occur to me that when a teacher explained a scenario starting with the phrase, “Imagine this,” most of my peers truly could see what was being explained inside their minds. It wasn’t until one of my friends told me that when she read she saw the events of the book play like a movie in her mind. It was mind-boggling to me that people actually saw images in their heads. I began researching the topic and discovered that I was not alone in thinking people were only speaking metaphorically when talking about envisioning things in their minds.
When my friend discovered I had never been able to imagine the scenarios from our shared love for books, she was shocked that I enjoyed reading at all. This confused me even further because I couldn’t think of a way my reading experience could have been enhanced even further. It was unfathomable to me that the words played like a montage of events in her head when to me the words signaled a connection between the characters’ emotions and my own.
Upon realizing my connection with the phenomenon known as aphantasia, I began noticing things about the way I read that made more and more sense. It was due to my lack of imagination that I couldn’t fathom the way a character would look without looking up fan art or seeing a picture from a movie, or the way I skimmed through descriptions because it didn’t make a difference what the interior of a house looked like if I couldn’t see it in my head. I began to pick up on the fact that most of the words I picked up while reading were dialogue because I didn’t need to “see” it. My love for romance novels began to make sense as well because of the emotion that they evoked. What I seemingly lacked in the visualization side of reading, I made up for in the emotional aspect.
Books are something that I have always been able to fall back on no matter my mood or whatever else has gone on during the day. Over the years, I have put myself in the shoes of hundreds of protagonists, allowing myself to feel what they feel, celebrate in their triumphs, and fall alongside them through their losses. Without being able to visualize the events in these stories, I have inserted myself into them to compensate for the difference in the way I read.
Without my realizing it, aphantasia has worked behind the scenes of my life, allowing me to connect with books in a more meaningful way than I ever could have imagined. While I may not have a mental movie playing in my head while I read, I still love my unique experience with books.
