Faces
A small story:
I was in my mid-thirties before I realized I have face blindness. In my defense:
It’s not a serious case. I recognize myself in pictures (and there is no condition for the mild disappointment I feel) and I rarely scream in terror upon discovering Consort in the shower.
To discern you have Prosopagnosia, you have to first determine you are uncomfortable in situations where other people seem comfortable, and I’m never not mildly uncomfortable.
If you live in Los Angeles, a fair amount of people do look interchangeable. The casts of THE BACHELOR confound me.
Mild face-blindness means there is no bestselling book in my future, documenting my horror the day I realized I had accidentally married the bartender at my wedding. All it means is that I’m miserably alive to the fact that I am always just one sentence away from a terrible faux pas.
As I said, I live in Los Angeles. Most of the people I know are either in the entertainment industry, over 35, or both. These are people who are more inclined to get something tweaked or, as we say, “freshened up.” Fillers may inflate your skin, but they screw with my mind.
If you move anything on your face, my brain announces, “Same but different, possibly a stranger.” I am then forced to glance at you shyly, hoping you will behavior will somehow signal whether we have actually ever met.
“Quinn is strange; she acted like she didn’t know me” seems like a better narrative than “Quinn asked if she knew me back when my cheeks were a quarter of an inch lower.”
For me to remember people, they are not allowed to drastically change things on a regular basis. If you are an African-American woman I know and my brain has filed away that your hair is short and natural and you decide to get locs, you are now an entirely new person to me.
I live in a muted quiet terror that: a) Someone thinks I’m racist because I ignored them and b) Someone now thinks I believe all non-white people look alike.
They don’t! Just so long as they send me a quick text to let me know they’ve changed their hair!
Dr. Oliver Sacks had severe Prosopagnosia, as does artist Chuck Close. As debilitating as it must be to recognize no faces at all, including your own, I envy them their totality, their world in which all faces are a muddled blank. Oh, the marvelous sameness.
My brain, concocted by a bad fairy that stood over my cradle, periodically decides a specific face is simply not getting past the velvet rope. I will never, ever, remember this face. Inevitably, this is someone with whom I share a mutual friend, a mutual friend who is a popular artist with occasional gallery openings, or socialite with an affinity for throwing cocktail parties. As you might imagine, large groups of people-you-sort-of know, maybe already set the face-blind on edge.
The following conversation has happened no fewer than seven times in the past decade, with different people:
QUINN: Hello, it’s nice to meet you.
FACELESS PERSON: We’ve met before. (a beat) Many times.
QUINN: I’m sorry; I have a mild case of Prosopagnosia.
FACELESS PERSON: I know. You’ve told me. (a beat) Many times.
I then do the only logical thing, which is to set a wastebasket on fire and escape in the ensuing confusion.
I have tried to cover for this in my life by saying neither “It’s nice to meet you” or “It’s nice to see you,” blending them into a failsafe “It’s nice to eeee you.”
Whatever relationship we have had, you will hear.
The only downside is that it kind of sounds like “It’s nice to eat you.” Perhaps this a Freudian slip, a cry of longing from my soul to ingest all the people of the world so that, finally, I might truly know them, truly see them, and keep them from changing their hair.
