Imagination Station
An apple a day can't keep The Horrors at bay, unfortunately
When I ask you to close your eyes and picture an apple, what do you see? (Apologies for the leading photo.)
If you’re like me, it’s a photorealistic apple, and you can change what it looks like depending on your whims: different colors or types, backgrounds, states of ripeness, hell, you can send that baby to space if you so choose!
On the other end of the spectrum is the person who spends their life assuming this question is a metaphor. Wait, people can actually see things in their heads??? If you’re on one of the extremes, it’s difficult to imagine what it’s like to live the other way. (As with spectrums, I assume most people fall somewhere in the middle.)
If you’re someone who sees nothing in your mind’s eye, you have aphantasia. If you’re like me and can subsume yourself into the running film of your choosing, you have hyperphantasia (which makes reading more fun and movie adaptations inevitably disappointing but for the grace you must learn to give).
Sidenote: There’s a fantastic episode of Science Vs1 that breaks it all down if you’re so inclined.
Tell me where it hurts
The downside of being able to immerse yourself in vivid imagination — because the universe always demands A Balance — is that you also vividly immerse yourself in every bad memory and intrusive thought.
Remember that dumb thing you said to someone once when you were tired or maybe should not have had that third beer? GUESS WHAT, BABY, you are right back there, viscerally in the moment, every single time your brain decides to revisit!!!!
What is it like to have a perfectly quiet, blank mind? I can’t decide if that sounds amazing or like a nightmare of empty hallways-style purgatory2 because it is so foreign to me. Did someone with hyperphantasia talk to someone with aphantasia and come up with the concept of meditation thousands of years ago?
Why is it that, as a species, we are always drawn to the opposite of what it is that we have?
This isn’t Disney’s Fantasia (BYO mind-altering substances)
One of the more unsettling things about being human and alive is a visceral reminder that other people walking around right next to you at any given time, in any given place, are experiencing the world in a way that’s completely alien to you.
If you’re a vivid apple imaginer, someone you get along with very well might have a blank void in their mind when you ask them to imagine an apple, and someone who is ostensibly your ~ * enemy * ~ might imagine an apple in the exact same way that you do. (Oh no.)
I am not trying to be a philosophy professor here and impart any particular Lesson; it’s just that in These Particular Times, I get increasingly worried that people seem to think they can only know, love, and spend time with other people who think exactly the same way that they do.
I will state the obvious caveat here that if you are a person who is part of any particularly vulnerable group, no, it is not your job to educate The Worst Person Alive Who Just Wants To Debate Your Right To Exist.
There is no voting on who gets to be people.
I am talking to those with any flavor of societal privilege or power; it’s vitally important to have healthy conversations with those who are not your ideological twin (i.e., everyone is respectful even when you do not explicitly agree) that do not have the end goal of convincing the other person that You Are Right.
Yes, it’s exhausting. But we all have to live together regardless of the various separatist fantasies floating around. Humanity has eternally been a shitshow, but an overwhelmingly cooperative one, or the line would’ve ended long before this many recessive genes resulted in me specifically3.
But Sparker, I am so very tired and sad
My babes, my precious and beautiful babes: I hear you.
I hear you, and I feel you on a molecular level. Whenever I start to feel like I need to lay down on the ground and not get up again for a while — and it’s not a pre-planned restorative yoga session — I like to remind myself that the best thing to do is something tangible to help my immediate community.
Find a cause you care about and pledge a recurring donation, or sign up to volunteer your time and energy. It doesn’t have to be a thousand dollars or a thousand hours; give $10, give one hour.
Everyone is sad and tired and broke (or broken), and all we will ever have is each other.
Tread softly with one another and with yourself.
Get Rec’d
What I’m reading, watching, being haunted by.
What I’m reading: I just picked up my copy of Deep End AND convinced one of my book clubs to read it. IT IS TIME TO DISSOCIATE BUT IN A SEXY WAY!!
What I’m watching: I saw Mickey 17 last Friday. It is weird and existential, and I love it very much.
Reality: Look, I used to be obnoxious and judgy about processed foods (“Those are the same ingredients as in a yoga mat!!!” etc), but then I learned more from experts in nutrition and expanded my knowledge of basic chemistry, so I’m aware that Riboflavin is vitamin B2 and carrageenan is commonly used as a thickening agent.
It’s good practice to ask: If someone is trying to scare you, what are they trying to sell you? (If it’s not a product, is it a certain lifestyle that they also profit from?)Escapism: If you’re local to Austin and looking for an escapist brunch for a good cause, join me at this year’s Mad Hatter Tea Party-themed Banner Brunch!
Wildcard: Please read this review of Christmas candy in March.
”(Before anyone judges me: I’ve checked the expiration date for all of the candy involved, and it is still months away. So I feel as though even the manufacturers accounted for this behavior, reasoning that at least five percent of people who buy their product are gremlins.)”
Geraldine is a gift to us all.
Until next time.
That’s really an episode of Radiolab, but citing sources is for nerds, so HELLO, FELLOW NERDS IN THE FOOTNOTES, but also sometimes I put jokes here
Is this what Severance is about I still haven’t started it
I took a genetics class in college as an elective (I like to party), where I learned that phenotypically, I am like… almost every single recessive gene you can get at once