Poor Facesight

I drew this image at work a few months ago on the whiteboard and I really like it (this is a re-creation because cameras are not allowed at work). The reason I like it is because it demonstrates a feeling I sometimes get that I think is foreign to a lot of people.

There’s a condition called face blindness where a person is unable to recognize the faces of other people and, among other even more debilitating effects, can’t suss out the various emotions that are often evident in them. I don’t have this but I think, like most mental conditions, it falls along a spectrum. So while I may not be face blind sometimes I feel like I have face low vision.

I don’t know what caused this; some of it might be genetic or part of my nerdish personality but I think much of it might have to do with my adolescence: many of the most interesting and compelling moments of it, when I really started to develop emotionally, involved text-based chat on the internet. Words, not images or facial expressions, are what I associate with those emotions and I’m pretty comfortable with that fact. I now have a very special relationship with words and conversation that I don’t want to lose, even if it means giving up a little bit of my social prowess.

For this reason I also don’t particularly trust my own face to display accurately what I am feeling, even though it probably does.

Anyway, I really liked this picture and I had some complaints about the picture that was at the top of the blog so I hope this is an improvement!