Cosmos of Kate

Growing up, I always wanted an imaginary friend. I told someone this recently and they asked, “then why didn’t you just.. imagine one?” The thing is, I didn’t want a pretend friend, I wanted a REAL imaginary friend. I wanted it to be like in the movies, when kids actually see and play with their imaginary friend. Alas, I never got one. As an adult I think back to that time of my life and wonder why it never happened for me, and also how many kids actually get to experience that. Then I also think about where I grew up. Out in the woods, on 20 acres of land, with a pioneer cemetery that no one else knew about a stone’s throw from my house. I could see the headstones from my backyard, and when I walked up there, I could see the headstones all cracked, fallen over, too worn to even read, sunken graves with missing headstones. And I start to think that perhaps my brain outsmarted itself in not giving me an imaginary friend, because more than likely I would have thought it was a ghost, and would have demanded that we move immediately.

I also remember as a child, looking through a book with pictures consisting of many small dots of slightly different colors, trying to see what number was depicted within the dots. It always seemed like such a simple task, all the numbers were clearly visible.. to me. It was then that I learned about color blindness. What an odd thing, to think that there were people out there who could not see what I see. I also learned shortly after that about the color spectrum that dogs see, which is much smaller than that of humans. A number of years ago I listened to a podcast called ‘Colors’ by Radiolab, which to this day is one of my favorite podcasts in existence. I learned that not only were some people color blind, but others have an extra cone in their eyes and can see colors that the large majority of humanity cannot, a condition called tetrachromacy. This blew my mind at the time. I remember being jealous of something I wished I had but never would. I also learned in that podcast about what the mantis shrimp sees. They have a whopping 16 cones compared to us humans who typically have three, allowing them to also detect ultraviolet, infrared and polarized light. Holy shit, what would it be like to see what they see?!

Yet another podcast recently taught me about a condition recently discovered in humans called aphantasia. People with this condition, roughly 1-4% of the population, can’t form mental images. They can’t close their eyes and picture themselves on a beach, laying on the sand under the blazing sun. They also can’t visualize their own memories, can’t relive past times in their mind’s eye whenever they want. What a horrible affliction this must be for them! At least, that’s what I thought when I listened to the podcast.

It was after hearing this most recent podcast about aphantasia, coupled with things I already knew from previous podcasts or life experiences, that I had, what felt to me, a bit of a personal epiphany.

No two living creatures perceive the world around them the same way.

This realization hit me suddenly and forcefully one day, and has changed how I look at life, people, animals, organisms of any kind. We are all living on the same planet, orbiting the same star, floating in the same universe, yet we are all completely isolated in our perception of life. This idea simultaneously made me incredibly sad, yet immensely more cognizant and appreciative of others’ views and perspectives on everything.

We don’t all visualize (through our eyes or in our minds) things in the same way, we don’t hear things the same way (some of us are harder of hearing while others aren’t), what smells good to one might smell atrocious to another, not to mention what animals like dogs can smell that we humans can’t. Touch is a big one. Pain and pleasure are two extremely subjective and personal experiences. Some people enjoy pain while others fear it. Some experiences that would normally be pleasurable to most might feel painful (physically or emotionally) to others.

This has all made me stop and think about what it means to be an individual living amongst many other individuals. We think of ourselves collectively as the human race, yet no two individuals experience life in the same way. It makes me think of people who judge others based on their individual experiences or perceptions. I myself have been harshly judged too many times to count based on something that I perceived a certain way, yet was told I was wrong and that there there is a definite, concrete, RIGHT way to perceive those things, or even that it was okay to feel or think differently, but that it was odd or not “normal.” What is normal when none of us are the same?

Some of us have imaginary friends as children, some of us can’t see colors others can, some of us love the smell of lilies while for others it evokes memories of death, some of us can visualize our memories or imagine things we’ve never seen while others can’t. Who am I to tell someone that their way of experiencing the world around them is incorrect or abnormal? I am a tiny part of a whole species, yet I am a whole individual. Don’t ever discount, judge, degrade or berate anyone for perceiving things differently than you do. They are not you, and we should all cherish and nurture our individuality, and the individuality of those around us.