every so often the internet reminds me that some people clinically lack an imagination

like, they can’t mentally see or hear anything; they have no internal monologue; there’s nothing going on in there

and, it kind of terrifies me that these people are just out there, allowed to make decisions

this is from the perspective of a girl who lives almost her entire life in her head, to the point that, aside whatever art she may entertain, external reality is more like a background process that sometimes she’s momentarily able to tune into, grab a flash of data to feed back into the kaleidoscope

any level of external stimulus overwhelms my system, sends my brain juddering into potential meltdown—twitching, sweating, reeling, nausea, dissociating, losing access to speech, losing motor control, losing circulation and heat regulation, blacking out

people talking to me especially shorts me out

by contrast i can sit or lie or curl up myself and undisturbed and entire days can pass while i play out scenes, images, sensations, conversations in my mind—and no, or little, time will seem to have passed

closing my eyes actually makes it harder to focus on my internal operas, causes me to drift

whenever an Internet Thing reminds me that people can just be the wordless abstract notion of tumbleweeds inside, i start to question if there’s an association between this blankness and people feeling upset by thoughts or visions, unable to distinguish between inner dialogue and demons or whatever

like. i can see (in mah brane) how a dude who normally lacks any imagination to speak of, if the right synapses connect and they happen to get the occasional brief spark of average intrasensory cognition, it might feel like a kind of mystical intrusion—or they might mistake it for extrasensory input

like these Internet People who read any discussion of imagination as strictly figurative, it follows that according to their lived experience and how they’ve learned to use language to frame what they know, such a person might not even recognize their own everyday lack of imagination for what it is

you know,

due to the lack of imagination

so when their brain does randomly happen to cross those wires and give them a rare jolt of inner awareness, they’re gonna object and say, no, what they saw or felt or heard or smelled wasn’t their “imagination”—they’re not lying, they insist; they didn’t just make it up, it was visceral, it was real

i don’t know if this comes off as patronizing, this thought process, but as with anything it’s less about personal judgment or whatever than about puzzle-solving—trying to understand why people behave or respond the way they do, often with alarm, often to perfectly normal things that i say to them

… yes, this is still about kelly

and to an extent also my ex-spouse

more generally, though, there’s just this to-me bewildering divide with some people where it seems like i simply cannot talk about my internal life without them acting like i’m nuts—and who in turn seem to have nothing inside