How Being Face-Blind Affects My Everyday Life
About my life with a mild form of prosopagnosia
When face blindness is covered in the media, it is usually sensational and undifferentiated. It is always about the extreme form of facial blindness, in which the affected person cannot even recognize their next of kin by their face.
Those who read such reports must believe that this disorder is a terrible stroke of fate. But this is only the case in really extreme states.
But more often people are like me. We say things like, “I don’t remember faces that well.” We also think that we are simply unfocused and annoy ourselves.
We have a light form of prosopagnosia and usually get along very well with it. Hardly anyone from our environment ever notices that we have this problem. Most people who suffer from mild prosopagnosia do not even know it themselves.
How face blindness manifests itself in me
To recognize a person safely, I must see them often. I certainly don’t recognize people I meet at a party later when they meet me somewhere else.
The better I know a person, the easier I’ll recognize them. The rarer I deal with someone, the more insecure I am at an encounter, whether it is that person or not.
