You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know

What it’s like to live with profound face blindness.

by Heather Sellers

Hi, I’m Heather Sellers, Would You Mind Always Wearing a Nametag?

An introduction to life with severe prosopagnosia, or face blindness.

Published on October 14, 2010 by Heather Sellers in You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know

Welcome to my new blog. I'm Heather Sellers, and you don't look like anyone I know.
Should we happen to meet, I would have to tell you right away that I will not recognize you when we meet again. I'm profoundly prosopagnosic: completely unable to recognize people by face.

"Don't worry!" most people say, "I'm terrible with names, too."

"No, that's not it," I say, urgently. I'm fabulous with names. I have to be-I need every single tiny clue I can get, just to make it through a day of students, meetings, errands, and social obligations. I am actually not going to remember your face, ever. Each time I see your face, it's for the first time. It's a serious problem. I need your help.

I'll discuss the compensations and strategies face-blind people use to navigate the world. Beyond that, I'll reveal what it's like to live with this mysterious and socially debilitating disorder. I lived most of my life not knowing about it. I grew up in a household where mental illness further complicated and obscured not only my condition, but just about everything else. And the disorder is still unfamiliar to most of the medical community, as I discovered firsthand through some disturbing, even shocking experiences with diagnosis and therapy before I was finally diagnosed correctly, at nearly forty.

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Some things are easier, post-diagnosis, but many times a day, the challenges prosopagnosia creates thrust me right into the heart of some of the most intricate scientific and philosophical questions: What is knowing? What is perception? How do we know what we don't know? I wonder a lot about what's going on in the brain, mine and yours. I wonder, constantly, what it would be like to know faces. And I wonder what I might lose were I to be cured.

For me, the blogosphere is, ultimately, a level playing field, a place where we recognize each other on equal terms. I'd love to hear from you. I look forward to connecting here in the one sphere where my disability is not a deficit.

Next up: What should I call it: Face blindness? Prosopagnosia?

6 Reader comments join the discussion here!

Tags: blindness, blogosphere, brain, challenges, clue, compensations, diagnosis, disability, errands, experiences, face blindness, faces, household, medical community, mental illness, perception, philosophical questions, prosopagnosia, sphere, worry

Next Post

Well, which is it? Face blindness? Or prosopagnosia?

Heather Sellers, a writer and professor living in Holland, Michigan, is the author of the memoir You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness.

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