Samantha Cunning

I have an art degree and to be honest I never really knew that aphantasia was a thing or that I had it, and that I may have been missing out on something that other people take for granted.  I've always just considered myself an artist who is skilled at reproducing things I can see in great detail but not so great at coming up with my own fantasy artworks or doodling things.  My doodles are rudimentary at best and I've never been extremely proud of anything I've drawn or painted that wasn't a still life, figure drawing, or based off a photo reference.  I was always better at math and science than other subjects and felt like I was just a very literal type of person all around.  So when I read the NY times article about the condition I didn't even realize at first that this was me until I went to take the test and couldn't visualize anything at all.  I can't visualize a basic shape like a circle.  I know what a circle is, I know it's round but I can't make myself see one.  My conceptualization of what people places and things look like is really just a list of descriptive metadata in my head.  (oh I'm a librarian too) I'm not sure I feel hurt in any way.  I might be nice to be more creative, but I'm great at reproducing things from life and photos.  I'm also a very focused individual who is able to accomplish a lot of tasks in comparison to others and always have been.  I feel grounded and able to be at peace with my thoughts, even the unhappy ones when I'm relaxing/contemplating things in a quiet room.  I could attribute these things possibly to not being distracted by visualizing the things I'm thinking about. I could add that maybe the fact that I didn't pursue art as a career is related to my aphantasia because at first I couldn't find a way to produce the type of art that people would ask of me and it was frustrating.  But when I settled on doing portraits of animals from photo and orthodox icon references (as a hobby/side business) it all just kind of worked out for me because I can physically look at reference photos and recreate an icon as someone's pet.