One of my favorite sayings that I made up used to be "Mark Hammill doesn't exist long ago in a galaxy far, far away."

 

One of the drawbacks of being aspie, at least for me, is mind blindness.  Keep in mind that Asperger's is a spectrum disorder, not a black and white diagnostic tool to define the brain function of an entire group.  It's basically a description of a variety of problems that some people can have that 'normals' don't.

 

Mind blindness in general means that I'm not supposed to be able to 'read' faces.  I miss little facial cues that indicate how the other person feels.  I might not notice someone is fantastically bored with me yapping on and on about something I'm obsessed with.  Very typical stuff you read about aspies.

 

But sometimes it goes deeper than that.  I have a facial recognition deficit problem, kind of like people get with brain traumas.  Even when people are familiar to me, I don't see them in my head the way they really look.  In the past I have been mildly laughed at for describing someone and getting the hair color wrong, and I just saw them within the week.  I also do this with eye color, and if I were to get really detailed, I couldn't accurately describe someone's nose as pointy or round.  It's not so much I can't remember as I'm so easily able to switch pieces and parts around in my mind.  I can reconstruct faces much like computers do.  Aspies are notorious for thinking in pictures, which means I can construct extremely detailed scenes and symbols for everything I hear or read or think.

 

The facial recognition problem gets a little amusing.  I worked a hotel desk for a couple of years and saw thousands of faces come through.  Some of the regulars got a little miffed if I didn't greet them like old friends or family members.  Some of them would stand around and talk to me and I wouldn't even remember I'd spoken with them previously until they asked about something I'd said before.  One older couple was truly hurt when I didn't remember them at all, even though, checking the computer records, I had checked them in myself not just the month before, but every month for six months.  I had to apologize and explain I have a deficit in facial recognition.

 

Conversely, I'm a little creeped out when people walk up to me in Walmart or somewhere and start talking to me like they know me.  I carry on a conversation just fine, but I never remember who the heck they were.  One time I asked the person what their name was, and they were so put off that it spoiled the rest of the conversation, which was quite short, and oddly, I never got the name.

 

I tend to lose people I'm with easily in public because I don't see them in a sea of faces, so I try to remember what they are wearing.  Sometimes this backfires, and I wind up following other people around, to no end of cracking up on Scott's part.  I can't tell you how many times I've surprised other people in Walmart thinking they were Scott when I was done absorbing myself in a label.  I have this thing about jars and labels, kinda distracts me.

 

Likewise, I get tv personalities mixed up like crazy.  I never could keep Dan Rather straight from a couple of other news reporters.  There are a few actresses I can keep straight because I've seen their movies so often (usually scifi movies), and by now Harrison Ford is iconic in my head, but I had no idea Steve Carell, Dan Burns, Maxwell Smart, Evan Baxter, and the mayor of Whoville were all the same guy.  Do you know how many times I saw the complete Star Wars trilogy before I knew who Mark Hammill was?  Probably dozens.

 

There are some faces I never forget, usually because the person has made a huge impression on me in some way.  This doesn't happen very often though.

 

I didn't realize that being like this is considered so defective until I ran into a person last year that specializes in doing therapy with patients who have suffered brain injury.  I was at a fundraiser laughing with someone about meeting them all over again 5 minutes later, and this woman happened to be in a nearby chair.  She was very intrigued that I have this much difficulty with facial recognition and was still able to hold jobs for years.  She asked me how I identify people, and I said it's an overall thing.  One person is tall and has a certain voice, another person is round and has a certain chuckle, another person reminds me of a cartoon and cracks me up, stuff like that.  It's not that I'm completely unable to recognize a face, it's more like it doesn't get properly catalogued.  If I have to go by a face alone with no other identifying characteristics, I get confused.  I have found pictures of several celebrities that have Scott's eyes and nose, and for some reason he reminds me of an uncle when he's tense, and his hair is like this or that person, and pretty quick, it's all a jumble in there.  It's like I don't see the whole face and tag a name to it.  What I see are similarities that some parts have to dozens of other faces I've seen, and the rest kinda just blurs in my mind.

 

So if you walk up to me to show me your new colored contacts, don't be surprised if I have no idea who the heck you are.   

 

Sometimes I think about what 'self' is, and what it means.  I think our sense of self has changed over the millennia that humans have been developing civilization.  I mostly think our personal sense of self has been twisted and invaded, and we may not realize we have been encultured to see our personal selves in ways our ancestors may never thought have.

 

Long before the barest of modern civilization, most people were unaware of their own faces.  We see faces all around us, but without mirrors, we don't see our own.  Can you imagine never having seen your own face?  This is true of all species on the planet.  Cats and dogs, chickens and horses, cattle and people, none of us are able to see our own faces.  For thousands of years most of the people on this planet had no idea what they looked like, excepting to assume they looked like the people around them, or when someone told them how they looked.  Back then faces were for more practical things, like seeing, eating, and smiling or frowning.  Faces are made to communicate how we feel to others.  We can show our disapproval or our glee at a joke.  Our sadness is evident on our faces, as well as our joy.

 

Things are very different now.  We go to great lengths sometimes to hide our real faces, to turn them into something that others can't see the real us through.  We look into mirrors and fix things we don't like, or practice our 'look'.  We create our faces to fit what we think they should look like.  We judge ourselves daily by the shortcomings we find in our own faces, now that we can see them.

 

I think it's odd that being able to see our faces can make us hate ourselves more, or make us feel more vulnerable, or for some, to feel more powerful.  I think it's crap that a few people are becoming billionaires on industries that improve our facial looks.  I think it sucks that how our faces look has become such a top priority that we can no longer accept the natural flaws that come with this life, and we go out of our ways to either 'sell' ourselves or hurt ourselves, depending on how we feel about our self images.

 

Can you imagine your dogs and cats acting like that?  We breed dogs to have different kinds of faces.  Can you imagine your dog being able to be mortified at finding out how ugly it is?  It wouldn't matter to the dog that you still love it and think it's the cutest ugly in the world, the dog's self image would be wrecked because it would never be satisfied now with its own face.  It would spend its life yearning for a different face and hating itself for looking so dumb.  Everything about its behavior would change on how it judged its own face.

 

Some people are born with disfigured faces or big birthmarks on their faces.  Some people are born with the most beautiful faces in the world.  Most people are born with ordinary faces that get zits and hair and dry or oily skin, and the people in those faces wish they could change something about that, even though every human face in the whole world goes through the same thing.

 

I never thought about my face as a child.  I wasn't self aware enough to realize my face was a big deal.  When I looked at other people's faces, I saw compassion, or anger, or sadness.  I didn't 'see' whether they were ugly or beautiful.  I didn't think about who was more pretty or whose teeth were straighter.  I went all the way through high school without one smear of makeup on my face.  I never dwelled on whether that was good or bad, and I didn't eat myself up with the idea that I might be ugly.

 

I learned in college that a little makeup goes a long way, and I thought it odd that people would respond more politely to me depending on how my face looked, in spite of how polite I might already be myself.  I began to notice other people around me, either being treated ill for being uglier than others, or treating others ill for being uglier than themselves.  I wondered why it wasn't evident to other people around me that a beautiful face acting ugly looks ugly.  This goes for both men and women, any age.

 

It's taken me many years to figure this out, because I'm autistic.  I think I may be deeper on the spectrum than some aspies because I was never self deprecating.  My sense of self is so far removed from associating it with social judgments that I guess I never 'got' that I was either ugly or pretty.  I can be both, actually, I've gotten pretty good at makeup and my hair and whatnot, or I can simply be me and not worry about it.  Sometimes I run into other aspies on other blogs who feel a sense of self loathing for not measuring up.  I myself felt anger most of my life for others being too stupid to understand *my* point of view, so I'm sure there is a wide range of how we see ourselves in light of others.

 

I feel concerned that so much of a person's self worth nowadays seems to come from a cultural standard based on commercialism.  We are inundated with 'pretty people' and the products they either represent or endorse, and that has come to permeate our lives to the point of people obsessing with their looks not just daily, but hourly.  What was most shocking was how the emo movement was quickly revolutionized into this commercialism, and now the billionaires are capitalizing on cutting, crying, and starvation, holding it up as cool.  Self destruction has become another line of products to spend our money on.

 

People have always felt some kind of shame or disgrace through the many years in many other ways in their cultures, but it's odd now that the notion of self worth is sweeping the world and utterly changing with a simple mirror.  Sometimes I think about that and wonder how much it is undermining the real treasure of self worth inside all of us.  If our looks are more important than our skills, that's not healthy for society.  If the way we judge others and have compassion boils down to how well we can 'sell' ourselves (just look at American Idol, but I boycott that show), then we are a sad human race.

 

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we could all look perfect.  Would we finally have peace and honest compassion and empathy for each other?  Would gossiping and snittiness disappear?  Would we all be content to just enjoy one another for who we are?  Would all our problems be solved?  Would we finally forgive ourselves?

 

 

I really like this movie.