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Strangelittlegirl
Blue Jay
Blue Jay

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Joined: 28 Oct 2016
Gender: Female
Posts: 81
Location: Ferndale, MI

20 Aug 2017, 12:11 pm

So, here's an excerpt from something I'm putting together. Opinions would be greatly appreciated:

Faces

My first memory is when my mom came back from California.
I couldn’t have been much older than two or three and I don’t remember her leaving specifically, but I remember how I felt. When she left and while she was gone, I realized that she would be gone a significantly long time. Significantly long enough for me to forget what she looked like.
That probably doesn’t sound very abnormal for a toddler. Children, especially small children, have irrational fears all the time. This fear, however, was a very, very real one for me. It was real because I had a problem remembering faces. Not always. Mostly, just the ones that came and went.
My mother was a single mother and was very social. Our house always seemed to have people visiting -- boyfriends, friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc, etc, etc. I don’t know what that sort of thing is like for other people, but for me, it made it hard for me to keep track of who was who. Faces are difficult for me and that was worse when I was younger. People would walk in and out of my life and I would forget who they were all the time.
So. My mother was going to California and she was going without me. The fact that she was leaving me to go somewhere so far away meant that she might be gone long enough for me to forget what she looked like. Whether I did or not is debatable. The human mind can only retain so much.
My first actually memory, however, started with her coming into the house and me seeing her and being elated, not only because I missed her, but because I hadn’t forgotten her.
Over the years, I realized that the inability to recognize faces was a bad thing, so one of the first skills I worked on honing was the ability to recognize people. Pretty soon, I got really good at it. Since faces alone meant very little to me, I started making associations. Sounds pretty simple, right? It wasn’t.
I started with celebrities. Ricky Schroeder – Silver Spoons, blonde hair, nice smile. Alfonso Ribeiro – Black best friend on Silver Spoons, kind of cock-eyed, could dance really good. Adrienne Barbeau – Dark curly hair, big boobs. David Hasselhoff – Puffy hair, drives Kit on Night Rider, looks good in black leather. I could go on.
That worked out all right for most celebrities, but sometimes certain things made it harder. At first it was celebrities on other shows. (Larry Hagman – Suit and tie, real jerk on Dallas…kind of looks like that guy on I Dream of Jeannie.) It was worse if characters were switched out on a television show (Wait, there were two actors playing Darrin on Bewitched??).
The upside to this process was that when I got old enough to be interested in boys, I found myself drawn to features that I liked best. (Erin Gray’s eyes, Lynda Carter’s legs, Suzanne Sommers boobs, Rae Dawn Chong’s hair…)
Oh. Right. Girls. That was the other problem.
By the time those hormones were starting to kick in, I was finding that I wasn’t feeling the same way towards boys as I was towards girls. Unfortunately, by that time it had been firmly drilled into my head that those were incorrect feelings. So, I worked on trying to focus on the boys. (Well, Ricky Schroeder is kind of cute. His hair is really blonde. Alfonso Ribeiro is black, so I should probably like him more. In fact, I should look for more blacks to like because that’s what the other girls like…)
At that point, there were no definitions of sexuality floating around me. I didn’t know or understand what “gay” meant until junior high school. Prior to that all I knew was that girls liked boys and boys liked girls. Girls didn’t like other girls. Not like that.
More on that later. I’m getting away from the subject at hand.
Eventually, I got good at celebrity faces. The associations got more complex as I started to understand the rules better.
1) Actors/Actresses can be on more than one show and sometimes even movies.
2) Sometimes they switch actors to play one character. This happens a LOT on soap operas.
3) Though lots of whites/blacks look similar in accordance to features indicative to their race, but they do not all look alike (and saying so outloud is considered bad, so don’t do it). Furthermore, if you encounter two actors that look similar, (ie. That time you thought Karen Allen and Brooke Adams were the same person) find pictures of them and put them side by side. It helps.
4) Certain facial changes can make a person look entirely different (see Michael Beihn in “Aliens” and “The Abyss” for reference.) Beware of haircuts and mustaches.
5) When all else fails, the eyes never change. Even actors and actresses in heavy makeup can’t change their way their eyes look. (See Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder for reference)
And so on and so forth. This eventually became an obsession as I started to make more associations. Characters on television shows became little lights for me to focus on. One of my earliest obsessions was Erin Gray. She was beautiful and a colonel…well, at least she was in Buck Rogers. I was completely fixated with her. Watching her told me that girls can be whatever they wanted to be in this world.


_________________
Your neurodiverse (Aspie) score: 175 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 49 of 200
You are very likely neurodiverse (Aspie)