From an unpublished memoir, The Whisper: A Memoir of Delusion.
The Mind Without Pictures
I didn’t know I was different.
Not for decades.
Children assume their minds work like everyone else’s. They assume their private world is the world. It wasn’t until much later—long after the blank pages had already shaped me—that I realized other people carried entire theaters behind their eyes.
Online, someone mentioned aphantasia and explained it. I had no idea that other people saw actual images or pictures in their minds, when they dreamed or closed their eyes.
I tried it. I closed my eyes and prompted myself. “Picture a car.”
Nothing happened. Blackness
Not darkness; darkness is something. There was nothing. A clean, white absence. A page without ink.
I waited for the image to appear, the way a child waits for a magician to finish the trick. But nothing came. No car. No color. No shape. No memory. Just the familiar blankness.
When I opened my eyes, the others were already describing their cars, blue ones, red ones, convertibles, trucks, the exact curve of the fender, the shine of the chrome. They weren’t guessing. They were seeing.
I wasn’t.
That was the first time I understood that my mind did not project pictures. It did not replay scenes. It did not summon faces. It did not store the past visually. My memories were not images; they were impressions.
Blank pages.
It explained so much.
My childhood memories arrived as isolated peaks with fogged valleys between them. I remembered the taste of adrenaline but not the shape of the monster chasing me. I could hear the sound of my father’s baritone but not see the stage he had stood on. The feeling of my sister’s arms around me was vivid yet I could not her face reflecting the fireworks that we watched.
Grief worked differently for me.
When my father died, I felt the weight of loss because I carried him in sensations, his laugh, his voice, the warmth of his presence. But when my mother died, the pages were blank. There was no internal theater to replay her. No image to lose. No picture to mourn.
Just the empty yellow box.
People think memory is a photograph. Mine’s more like a ledger someone spilled coffee on years ago — smudged and warped, yet legible in places. A record of meaning, not imagery. I remember what things felt like, not what they looked like. I remember the emotion of a moment and push it away.
My inability shaped everything.
I didn’t miss people when they were gone, not in the way others describe. I didn’t carry their faces with me. I didn’t replay moments. When someone left, they simply… weren’t there. And when they returned, it was as if no time had passed. Presence was everything. Absence was nothing.
My nightmares were not visual; they were physical. Heat, sweat, pounding footsteps, the metallic taste of terror. The monster had no face because I could not conjure one. Fear lived in my body, not my mind’s eye.
I never saw the worlds I created. I built them. Concept by concept. Meaning by meaning. Architecture instead of imagery. My imagination was structural, not visual. I didn’t picture adventures; I constructed them.
When my world fractured, I turned everything into an adventure. Not because I saw it that way, but because I felt it that way. My mind didn’t give me pictures; it gave me stories.
Aphantasia made me particularly susceptible to Delusion. The Whisper slipped easily into the gaps where images should have been. Into the blank pages of my life. Into the valleys between memories. Into the places where other people store faces and warnings. A mind without pictures is a mind vulnerable to meaning imposed from the outside.
And it shaped how I became myself. I am a person who remembers through sensations and words. In my life, meaning takes precedence over visual impression. I live in the moment because I cannot visualize the past nor the future.
How could I grieve one parent and not the other? Because my memories are built from fragments, not films. My childhood was a series of emotional peaks separated by blank pages.
My mind is a room without pictures. For years I mistook that for absence — as if the lack of imagery meant the lack of memory. But memory has more than one language. Mine speaks in sensations and the residue a moment leaves behind.
Through my inability, I learned to trust reality without the backdrop of visual memories. To survive trauma among invisible monsters.
As best I could, I navigated childhood through the blindness of my mind’s eye. Only through daily repetition could I associate a face with those who loved me, those whom I loved.
I did not know it at the time, but I grieved my childhood cut short in the dark.
Aphantasia didn’t erase my past. It simply forced me to carry it differently.
Other people remember in photographs. I remember in the way a moment settles into my body long after it has passed.
Or, I don’t remember at all.
