When my first child was born, I quit my job at Harvard to look after her full time. I’d worked in three different jobs at Harvard; the last two roles saw me building websites for medical researchers.
One day, when my daughter was only about three weeks old, my friend Simon emailed me, wanting to know if I was interested in helping his friend Julia with a project. She was a young professor at MIT, and needed a simple website built for people with dyslexia. This was certainly something I could help her with, so we arranged to meet at a cafe near MIT, called Area Four.
Julia and I hit it off immediately — terribly nice, but also clever, a quality I find reassuring in an MIT professor. She was also delighted to meet Boudica, my baby, who I had brought along strapped to my chest.
My most recent role at Harvard had been creative director for an autism research lab. I’m a pretty decent web-developer, though I seem to be good with high-concept solutions. And in a way, my proposal for Julia’s dyslexia website was very me. I offered to build two web portals. The first would use fonts designed specifically for people with dyslexia. The second would be for neurotypical visitors — i.e. people without dyslexia — and this site would look completely bizarre and confusing. You know, difficult-to-read fonts, JavaScript to make the text illegible, font sizes undulating randomly and jostling together on the screen.
As I said to Julia, it wasn’t an excellent idea, although it was a funny one — and these, I somehow felt, never quite seem to get the credit they deserve. Julia declined the second option — she was an MIT professor, after all — but she liked my creativity. She was some sort of brain scientist, and my capacity to be creative seemed to interest her. A few years earlier, and just for fun, I had founded Wrongcards — an ecards site offering cards that were wrong for every occasion. Julia carefully viewed every single webpage of it, and seemed sincerely impressed with it.
One Friday, we met up at Area Four and I mentioned I would be flying out to San Francisco the following day, where I’d be catching up with our mutual friend, Simon — that is, the scientist who had put her in touch with me. I liked Simon in much the same way I liked Julia; clever people, interested in solving problems. I was glad to know them both.
But I was different from them, of course. My mind is almost entirely focused on creative tasks. This means, I listen closely to my intuition, which leads me to live an altogether stranger sort of existence. I seem to experience startlingly different reactions to things or situations, for instance, where others might feel more neutral. My earliest childhood memory: I was four years old, and my mother had returned from the hairdresser with a new hairstyle. I didn’t like it. I actually roared at her, ‘Get out of the house, woman!’ I remember this vividly. My mother also remembers it, and mentions it a few times a year, because it still amuses her. And so, I grew up accustomed to being treated as slightly eccentric. Mind you, if you grow up in rural Queensland and don’t feel too interested in cricket, you, too, will be branded as some sort of wild-eyed heretic.
Anyway — San Francisco. The next day, after meeting Julia at Area Four, I was in Simon’s apartment, listening to music and talking about blenders — he’d convinced me to buy a Vitamix, actually — when there was a knock at the door. He opened it, and a woman stepped inside. She greeted him, then turned and looked at me with a strange smile. Then they both stared at me without saying a word. I waited for Simon to introduce me to his friend, but the silence ran on.
I had no idea what was going on.
“Kris?” prompted Simon. “It’s Julia.”
No, it wasn’t. Julia was in Boston — I’d seen her there the previous afternoon. This woman? Never seen her before in my life. I stared and stared; she was not even remotely familiar. Simon must be playing some sort of complicated, intellectual prank on me, which seemed odd and out of character. Anyway, I didn’t much enjoy this joke; it was unsettling.
But actually, no — I was mistaken. The woman standing in Simon’s apartment really was Julia. Evidently, she’d had a trip to San Francisco already scheduled that same weekend, and when I mentioned I’d be there too, she thought it would be funny to surprise me; what could go wrong?
What went wrong was that I didn’t recognize her. When I realized it was her, I almost shrank away. I felt terribly shaken. And, obviously, the coldness of my reaction troubled Julia. I also sensed I had annoyed Simon. Then again, I was a bit shaken up, somehow. It was the most inexplicable feeling of confusion. I felt momentarily worried for my sanity.
“Sorry, when you came in,” I said, apprehensively, “I thought I was hallucinating. I thought — well, I guess you have schizophrenia now, Kris.”
Julia — again, an MIT brain scientist — said, in a similarly awkward tone, “Actually, if you had schizophrenia, the symptoms would have manifested years ago...”
“A-ha! That’s exactly what a hallucination would say to me!”
It didn’t really work. They were exchanging glances. Julia knew me to be gregarious and playful, not cold or standoffish. She had no reason to expect me to look so blankly at her — nor be so alarmed and confused when I finally did recognize her. I don’t know if I hurt her feelings exactly, but I could see I’d made her feel terribly self-conscious and strange.
It seemed, to me, that they both became more distant with me after that weekend — or, at least, more reserved, and more professional. From then on, I no longer felt I was in a room with friends. What I had lost was a sense that I belonged in that particular room at all. These were clever people who had, provisionally, decided I was one of them. Then they changed their minds.
What if I had recognized Julia that night? What if I had processed it easily, and felt delight to see her, instantly, instead of just being dazed for a drawn-out minute? Would we still be friends? Perhaps, she might have recommended me to someone else working at MIT; after all, I’ve always been hired through word of mouth, one favor leading to the next. But seriously, I don’t know; I just felt I’d failed some sort of unforeseeable test.
Just the other day, I was in a grocery store (here, in Australia) and a woman smiled and said hello, and — it was just like that time in San Francisco. I had no idea who she was; the only difference, now, is that I’ve learned to bluff.
“Hey, it’s good seeing you!” I said. “But where do we know each other from, again?”
Her smile faltered. “I was Boudica’s teacher last year.”
“Right, that’s what I thought!” was my reply. It’s not true, but I’ve learned not to tell the truth, in situations like this. “You know, she adores you? She still mentions you all the time.” That was true — Boudica’s teacher was outstanding. We’d had two genuinely warm parent-teacher meetings. I’d have recognized her at the school, but this grocery store? It was, perhaps, five kilometers from there, which might as well have been the distance from Boston to San Francisco.
Since returning to Australia, I have become somewhat more reclusive. In fairness, I spent much of two decades around people like Julia and Simon; my friends were kooky folk who worked mainly in research or academic libraries. When your full-time job is parenting, you tend only to mingle with other parents. In the early years this was fine; I loved meeting newborn bubbas and talking about sleep schedules. But over time I found myself steadily avoiding other parents, and possibly because here in Brisbane, they only seem to want to talk about cricket or real estate. Or perhaps, I’ve always been shy all along — I don’t know.
I write this Substack, and I write novels, and I parent, and I feel honestly overwhelmed. I can present no enthusiasm, counterfeit or otherwise, for any conversation that touches on investment homes or Australia’s property market or asset appreciation — whenever anyone starts up on that stuff, my mind wanders off, of its own accord. This is what nobody warns you about when you become an adult: a perfectly normal-looking person will walk up and start yapping about equity, or how they refinanced their something-or-other. And I somehow think it’s difficult enough, you know, surviving in the world, without having to hear about tax laws and building codes.
In this country, the property market itself has become a national pastime, surpassing even cricket. I know there’s a whole community of like-minded lunatics out there somewhere who also don’t want to hear about kitchen tiles; I just haven’t broken into it, on account of all the parenting I have to do.
But did you ever notice, in old movies, how everyone seems to be drinking heavily? That never made sense to me. But now, I realize it’s how people used to cope during conversations about kitchen tiles.
“But why should I be forced to listen to everyone?” I said to my wife, the other day. “Nobody has proper interests any more. The property market isn’t an interest! Houses should be houses, not an elaborate board game for people with status anxiety.
“This is why I liked Harvard,” I fumed. “Everybody working there was weird. People mostly just talked about their special interest. Nobody mentioned kitchen tiles, there, out of basic human decency. Maybe I need to go back to Harvard.”
“Stop that talk,” said my wife. “That institution has enough problems as it is.” She was half out the door, on her way to meet someone called Melanie.
“Have I met Melanie?”
“Several times. You called her Emily the other day, to her face.”
“I have been preoccupied with my writing,” I replied, very reasonably.
I have become too inattentive, I thought to myself, after she left. Then again, if I’m mixing up people’s names, is it entirely my fault? There’s a lot of talk about kitchen tiles and the property market, out there. It all makes my mind wander away like a newly-adopted puppy.
But it appears I have digressed. Recognizing people. Listen, this next part is very strange.
A few weeks ago it was my birthday. My little girls woke early to make me fluffy pancakes, then started shouting at each other about who was better at making fluffy pancakes. I don’t actually like fluffy pancakes, but my daughters believe they would be doing me an extraordinary service if they could, somehow, and through sheer force of personality, change my opinion of fluffy pancakes. And so they argued, and I went out for a walk.
Then my mother called to wish me happy birthday, and we talked about her friend Norah — the one with the spider baby — and then about my brother, who she finds endlessly amusing.
I don’t usually like to mention my brother, here, because there’s no way to do so without seeming like I’m either exaggerating or mocking him. He’s just so befuddled, you see. Frequently, he arrives at places — restaurants, cafes, airports — only to realize he’s forgotten to put on shoes that day. He has been diagnosed with ADHD, but so have a dozen or so of my friends, and none of them turn up anywhere sans shoes. I somehow suspect he suffers from something else, but I don’t know precisely what. If I had to name it, I’d call it incurable daftness. What I will say on his behalf, however, is that he has never once called me up to talk about kitchen tiles.
My mother loves telling stories about his antics, and on my birthday she told me, again, about the time he went to shake a colleague’s hand — someone he’d worked with for three years — and only then noticed the man had no arm.
“What happened to your arm?” he exclaimed, in fright.
The man looked at him, incredulous. “I lost it in an accident when I was a child. How did you never notice?!”
“He is such a loon,” was my mother’s delighted conclusion.
“Hmm,” I said, wondering whether clinical daftness might one day become a diagnosis. All I need to do is get him in a room with Julia, that MIT brain scientist, and she can do the rest. One more scientific paper with my name as co-author...
“Then, last week,” my mother continued, “he was at work and a woman started talking to him and he didn’t have a clue who she was. Tried to pretend, but it didn’t work. He was horribly embarrassed, and so was she. Apparently, they’d done a ten-week course together last year. He says this sort of thing happens to him all the time.
“He’s so addled,” she marveled.
“Yes, well, to be fair,” I said, “that can happen to everyone. Yesterday a woman said hello to my wife and me at the grocery store. I smiled and said ‘Hi’. Then, once she’d gone, my wife let me know it was one of our neighbors. I asked her, ‘Have I ever spoken to her before?’ and she said, ‘Yes, several times.’ I suspect it’s the one with the little girl, with the short hair. My wife thinks I forget people on purpose, because I’m sick of hearing about the property market.”
“Well,” said my mother, “I said to your brother, I reckon you’ve got a touch of face blindness.”
“I’m not sure that’s a real thing,” I said. “Sounds like a plot device invented by disaffected Hollywood screenwriters. Hang on, I’ll put you on speaker while I google it.”
While typing, I told her about the incident at a different grocery store, some weeks earlier, when Boudica’s teacher from last year said hello to me, and I’d have sworn, in that moment, I’d never seen her before in my life.
“But I think everyone’s like this. We need context clues to place people —”
“Yeah, nah,” my mother interrupted. “I reckon you’ve got face blindness, as well.”
I stared at my phone, waiting for Wikipedia to load. “Haven’t you ever met someone out of context and not recognized them?”
“Not really.”
“Wait — no, apparently I’m wrong. It’s a real thing. Proso ... pros ... prosopagnosia.” I read aloud, “A cognitive disorder that impairs a person’s ability to recognize familiar faces, including their own, while other visual processing remains intact.
“Well, I don’t have that,” I said, interrupting myself. “Though I don’t quite recognize myself in the mirror most days. But this reminds me — when Boudica was little, we kept her hair short and she looked like Shirley Temple. Then it grew out, and my wife tied it back in a ponytail one morning while I was out.
“I met them all at a cafe later, and I was sitting there looking at my wife, and at Hattie, and at this strange little child I did not seem to recognize. I mean, I knew it was Boudica, but her face seemed to have a completely different bone structure. It was like an optical illusion.
“I’d seen her that same morning. She’d looked entirely normal. A few hours later with hair tied back for the first time in her life, she was a total stranger to me. I sat there taking photos of her on my phone, fascinated. It was like she had an entirely different face. My wife couldn’t see it. I assumed she wasn’t looking closely enough.”
I break off, remembering something. When I was about four, my mother had come home with a different haircut. I didn’t recognize her. I panicked, I yelled at her. This is my earliest memory: the day my mother went out alone, and came home wearing a stranger’s face.
But I didn’t know who she was! Some evil-looking woman had stolen my mother’s clothes and was coming up the stairs to kidnap me. I yelled at her, demanded she leave. Then the strange woman spoke, and I heard my mother’s voice underneath it.
I’m still staring at my phone. Another sentence from Wikipedia:
Prosopagnosic children can even have a hard time telling family members apart, or recognizing people out of context (e.g., the teacher in a grocery store).
“Wait,” I said. “Wait, what?”
***
I return home. In my kitchen, a woman smiles at me. I now only suspect she is my wife.
“I might have a neurological disorder,” I tell her.
“Only one?” she says, and wafts out of the room, which somehow confirms she is my wife. She has an eyebrow ring; that, I realize, is how I’ve been doing this all along. So often I’ve glanced across a room and thought my wife looked oddly unfamiliar. I’ve thought that about everyone I love, at one time or another. I’m accustomed to that unease. I suppose a man can become accustomed to just about anything.
It can be difficult to feel close to people when their face is sometimes unrecognizable. And you know, I carried little Boudica everywhere with me when she was a baby. All I wanted to do was gaze at her, in awe of her loveliness. And I knew her face better than anyone’s. Can you begin to imagine how unsettled I was that day, when I suddenly couldn’t recognize her?
So many times, I have quietly stared at a person and thought: they’ve changed something in The Matrix.
And can you believe I used to think I was observant? All that time, face blindness was staring me in the face. You’d think I’d have recognized it.
I feel so foolish. And a bit worried about what else I haven’t noticed. But a good friend told me that Oliver Sacks, himself, was face blind, and didn’t know it until he was middle-aged. Coincidentally, he was visiting his brother in Australia, who also suffered from prosopagnosia.
But, obviously, he didn’t notice — why should he, when all this feels so ordinary? And in fairness to the good Dr. Sacks, it’s often simpler to assume you’ve just been inattentive. No wonder it dawned on him here, during a trip to Australia. I don’t know if Sacks kept a diary, but if he did, the relevant page would have gone like this:
I don’t recognize anyone here in Australia. Feels a bit odd. In fairness, nobody is saying anything interesting, either. A lot about something called cricket, and much about kitchen tiles, and (for some reason) the local property market. Tremendously banal, faces almost blur together. On a more interesting note, my goofball brother says he has face blindness and ... wait, what?
Yours with chaste affection,
Kris St.Gabriel
Always gladdens my heart to see a post from you, thanks for the smiles you bring. I can't find words to respond to this post, but if I could ... they would be words that gladdened your heart
"Only one" 😆 I absolutely now adore your wife.