I knew there had to be a name for it.
(Or, Gwen confesses a disability.)
Today I experienced the 30th or 40th humiliating experience in my life caused by my tendency to get faces confused. When I got home today, I decided that, once and for all, I would keep looking up phrases like “face recognition disorder” on the Internet until I found out if there was an actual condition that involved being unable to tell faces apart.
There is. It’s called prosopagnosia. Or, as websites by normal people are calling it, face blindness.
***
I.
When I was a teenager, I discovered that I got people’s faces “mixed up.” Especially white people’s faces, especially when they had similar hairstyles. (You know – like 99% of the ones you saw on TV when I was young.) I mentioned this to my dad. He said he got faces mixed up, too. I chalked it up to the fact that all white people look alike.
II.
When I went to UT and took a genetics course to fulfill my science requirement, I learned that women born with only one X chromosome have Turner Syndrome, one of the symptoms of which is the inability to recognize faces. I worried a little, then asked my dad if I’d been born with both X chromosomes. He said I had. I chalked it up to the fact that everyone’s a hypochondriac when they’re learning about diseases and disorders.
III.
Throughout my marriage, my then-husband was amused/astonished/annoyed by my inability to recognize the most familiar character actors, no matter how hard I tried. Eventually it became part of our couple shorthand.
Me: Okay… wait… is that the same guy who played…
Him: No, Gwen, it’s not.
Me: Oh. Damn.
I chalked it up to the fact that he was a bit older than me and therefore recognized all the old actors who had no cultural impact on my generation.
IV.
I realized that I had a real problem the first time I planned to meet some online friends in real life for the first time. Remember in the mid to late nineties how we were all doing that despite the media’s horror stories? And freaking out about it? My friends were freaked out about what to wear, where they’d sleep during our traveling meet-ups and the fact that they were 20 to 40 pounds heavier than their photographs had let on.
I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to find my friends at the airport.
“What if I don’t recognize y’all?” I e-whispered to them.
“Of course you’ll be able to recognize us, silly!” they said. “You’ve seen our pictures!”
Yeah, but only their faces. Back then, I spent most of my time isolated in a trailer in BFE with the familiar faces of my husband and children as my main companions. The one picture I’d seen of cyber-buddy Nicole was her wedding portrait. Her headpiece pulled back all her hair, leaving nothing but a beige face with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, the same as all human faces had, as so cogently pointed out by Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass.
I formed a plan. Nicole, Maria, Gail and Moira were the ones designated to pick me up at the gate. I knew from their pictures that Gail had short curly reddish hair, Maria had long dark curly hair and Moira had medium-colored straight hair. When I saw them, I would use the process of elimination and so deduce which one was Nicole.
I got off the plane and frantically (though outwardly calmly) searched the crowd with my eyes.
“Gwen!” four women screamed at me. I looked at them and found that, to my horror, they had all changed their hair. No one had the hairstyles or even hair colors I was looking for, except for Gail. (I love you, Gail. Never change.) They ran up and hugged me and took my bags. I stayed quieter than I normally would have, desperately waiting for clues. Maria’s Jersey accent gave her away. Gail looked at Moira while saying her name. So I had three covered, but for some reason, I decided Nicole couldn’t be Nicole. I think it was because she had a mole I hadn’t noticed in her photo or because her hair was light when my imagination had been certain it was dark. So, I figured she had to be Sharon and that we would meet up with Nicole later. There. Done. I was a clever detective, y’all.
We walked down the hall, arm in arm. I turned to Nicole and said, “So, where’s Nicole?”
After all the shock and awkwardness caused by my weirdness wore off, my friends chalked it up to jet lag.
(I’m glad you didn’t hate me after that, Nicole. (Unless, of course, you secretly did.))
***
Since that day, I’ve had to deal with that sort of situation many times, but I’ve become much better at playing it off. About 95% percent of the time, I can distinguish people by their hair or glasses or bodies. Once I’ve seen a person’s face a few times (like, 27) I can recognize it without the extra clues. Unless they drastically change their hair. Or unless I meet someone else with similar coloring, hairstyle and body type. About 8% of the people I meet have faces that are easy to remember because they’re unique to me in some way. (Or maybe because they look like someone I’ve known in the past?)
So, for the most part, it’s okay. I find myself totally drawing a blank on someone I’m supposed to know, or calling someone by someone else’s name, only about 5 or 6 times a year. Okay… I find myself getting caught doing it that often. (Hint: If I’ve ever made what seemed like a really weird non-sequitur to you and then said, “Just kidding!” and left you thinking, “What a lame joke,” then it was probably because, at first, I thought you were someone else.)
I like Cecilia Burman’s site because it’s informative, well written and humorous. She created a funny (but also extremely fitting) metaphor to help “non-face-blind” people see how it is for people like me. She created an eery – no – frighteningly familiar page about how faces look in her mind.
Mostly, though, I like her site because, like me, she’s coped very cleverly with her “disability”. (Or maybe it’s because her face reminds me of Tara’s.) (What? Okay – you’re right. She looks nothing like Tara.) I imagine that women are better at coping and hiding these troubles than men because we take more notice of things like hair and fashion, anyway.
I’m not going to make this a site about face-blindness, because there are plenty of sites out already out there, as I now know. And I’m probably not even going to hang out on those sites’ forums or even worry about having prosopagnosia that much. I’m just relieved to know, finally, that it’s a real condition, and that I’m not the only one who has it.
However, if you have it, or suspect you do, and feel like emailing me to say so, I’d be glad to hear from you.
Also… I’m gonna make sure my dad reads Cecilia’s site.
Man. It felt good to get that off my chest. Thanks for listening, y’all.
