Page 31 of Hello Stranger

I was face-blind.

Maybe I’d stay that way, and maybe I wouldn’t. But one thing was certain. I would never be the same.

It was like suddenly finding myself on an alien planet. Even in the hospital, where caretaking was literally the job of every person I interacted with, people felt strange and foreign and vaguely unsafe. Either I was thinking about all the missing faces and working to avert my eyes, or I was staring at them, still disbelieving, or I was forgetting about my brain situation—and then looking up only to be startled by yet another faceless face.

To be clear, I knew intellectually that the faces were still there. If I looked carefully, I could see the individual parts. What I couldn’t do was glance at a face and know in an instant exactly who that was and remember everything I’d ever learned about that person. Or in the case of strangers: know immediately that I didn’t know.

This new way of being was a conscious process of deduction. There was nothing effortless about it.

Now, most of the time, rather than trying, I just let everybody be a blur.

My conscious mind understood what had happened. The FFG wasn’t working. Got it. Just a little brain snafu. Not reality. Just a glitch in my system.

But my subconscious mind—the one that wasn’t too used to having to rethink reality—was deeply, profoundly freaked out.

I could understand in theory that I was face-blind.

But in practice? It made no sense at all.

I learned pretty quick from obsessive research on the internet that two percent of the world’s population has face blindness. So I definitely wasn’t alone. Out of 8 billion people in the world—and I got out the calculator for this—there were 160 million other people who were face-blind. Besides me. That figure was larger than the population of Russia. We could start our own country and compete in the Olympics.

Except a lot of them, it turned out, didn’t know they were face-blind.

I had a kind of face blindness known as acquired. The kind people procured somewhere along the way—strokes, head injuries, brain surgery. Most people with acquired face blindness know they have it. If you’ve always been able to recognize faces and then suddenly you can’t anymore… you notice that.

But the much more common type was known as developmental. These folks had been face-blind all their lives—and many of them didn’t even know it. Which makes sense. Because if that’s how the world has always been for you, then that’s how it’s always been. Nothing about that would seem odd. You’d assume that everybody else was exactly the same way.

I found a couple of Facebook groups and read every comment on every post, trying to get the skinny on what it was really like to function in the world like this. Most people had tips and tricks for recognizing people without using faces as the main clue, and some people seemed very good at it.

As for how everyone felt about having the condition, I found a wide spectrum of opinions. Some people found it limiting or frustrating ordepressing… while others thought it wasso not a big dealthat they didn’t know why it merited discussion. One woman wanted to know the point of even talking about it when there were “people with actual problems” out there. Another highly likable woman described her face blindness as a “superpower,” saying she treated every person she interacted with like a dear friend—just in case those people turned out to actually be dear friends. When people talked to her in the grocery store as if they knew her, she pretended she knew them right back, and asked them question after question until she could solve the mystery for herself. She learned a lot about people that way, she said—but more than that, it meant that almost every interaction she had with other people was infused with warmth and affection. In a way, there were no strangers.

She loved her face blindness. She felt like it brought her out of her shell. She wholeheartedly believed it was a gift.

Huh.

I closed my eyes and tried to see this moment in my life as a gift.

Yeah. No.

My experience of all this so far was the opposite of living in a world with no strangers. For me, right now, everyone felt like a stranger. Even me.

I mean, I just genuinely couldn’t imagine walking out into a world where everyone looked like bowler-hat figures in a Magritte painting and feeling… awash in a gentle sea of human kindness.

Maybe it was more about the adjustment than anything. The before-and-afterness. The fact that the world—my world—was changed in ways I’d never even imagined before all this happened. The fact that a central tool for relating to the rest of humanity—one I’d relied on constantly, every day, my entire life—was suddenly just…gone?

It was scary, if I’m honest. I was never all that great with people to start with.

All to say, for the first three days I was home, I couldn’t seem to make myself leave my apartment.

I mostly just did wound care. And ordered takeout. And watched old movies.

And availed myself—after much hemming and hawing—of Lucinda’s credit card.

I had sworn never to need my dad or Lucinda’s help. But was using that card “needing” them, really? Especially if I was buying luxury items I didn’t need. That was something different from needing them. That waspunishingthem. Right?

If you thought about it the right way, it was a form of winning.

And so I went for it. I enjoyed my first bout of recreational shopping in years: a hygge-inspired tea kettle, a string of twinkle lights branded as “wishing stars,” a heart-shaped velveteen pillow… and a totally nutty hybrid cross between a pair of footed pajamas and a fuzzy blanket called a Pajanket.

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