It's Not That I Don't Feel
A short introduction to Aphantasia and Alexithymia — especially in autistic, ADHD, and AuADHD brains
Let me start with a correction, because people usually have it wrong:
It's not that I don't feel. It's that I don't know what I feel.
Those are different problems with different solutions, and getting them confused — treating me like I'm cold, or absent, or not-quite-human — is one of the more exhausting misunderstandings I navigate. I feel things. The signal is there. The labeling software is just missing, or running slow, or returning an error. Alexithymia: from the Greek, roughly, without words for feelings. That's a more accurate description of the experience than "can't feel," and a lot less insulting.
Alexithymia is common in autistic and ADHD brains. In AuADHD — the overlap, which is where I live — it's essentially a default setting. I learned to identify emotions by pattern-matching against my behavior: if I slammed a door, I was probably angry. If I couldn't get out of bed, I was probably depressed. I was doing forensic reconstruction of my own emotional state, years before I had the vocabulary for it. Still do.
The second thing people usually have wrong: the face.
I don't recognize you visually. Facial recognition depends on visual memory — the ability to hold someone's face in your mind, compare it to what you're seeing, and make a match. I can't do that, because I can't hold a face in my mind. I have to work out who you are: your height, the way you walk, your voice, your glasses, the context I'd expect to see you in. I have built a very thorough non-visual library of the people I know. What I don't have is the quick-match that everyone else seems to use without thinking.
This is aphantasia.
If you're unfamiliar with the word, here's the fastest explanation I know: try the meditation prompt. Close your eyes. Clear your mind of thoughts and visions. Find a quiet, dark mental space.
For most people, that's the destination — something to work toward. For me, it's the departure point. It is always quiet. It is always dark. Even with a constant stream of thought running — and there is always thought — it is wordless, imageless, and silent. No internal monologue in a voice. No mental pictures. The thoughts are just there, already-formed, like subtitles without a film.
This affects more than meditation. I play fretless bass. I can play any song — as long as I can see it in real time. Sheet music, tablature, a video I can watch while playing. What I cannot do is hear the song in my head and play to that, because there is no song in my head. Other musicians describe getting a song stuck in their head. I have never had that experience. I understand the words, and I'm told I'm missing something, and I believe them.
The math thing is its own odd corner: I can do complex calculations in my head, as long as I don't think about them. The moment I try to consciously run the process, it falls apart. It's faster as a background task. I've learned not to interrupt it.
The one exception to my aphantasia is dreaming.
I dream. And this, perversely, is the harder problem. Because I have no voluntary internal vision, my brain can't reliably distinguish "this was a dream" from "this was a real sensory event." Any nightmare I remember is indistinguishable, at the level of origin, from a real memory. It adds to the PTSD, because the machinery that would normally tag it as not-real is the same machinery that's absent when I'm awake. I carry nightmares the same way I carry memories.
Informally, from asking people over the years: I think partial aphantasia is significantly more common than the extrapolated estimates suggest. People don't know what they're not experiencing. You can't miss the apple-tree imagery if you've never had it, and you can't report it as absent if you assumed everyone was in the same dark room.
I'm AuADHD. The combination of autism, ADHD, aphantasia, alexithymia, and the weight of cPTSD means I frequently compare myself to a language model. Input in, output out. Spontaneous generation is harder. I have never, in my life, started a conversation with someone unfamiliar. Not because of fear. Because the starting mechanism assumes a kind of internal rehearsal — a voice, a face, an imagined scene — that I don't have.
Not stranger danger. Just: how?
If any of this sounds familiar, you're probably not alone. You're probably also just a little bit more like me than the statistics have gotten around to counting yet.
Alexius McMullin is AuADHD. He writes about neurodivergence, cybersecurity, and dying, frequently at the same time. He's based in Albuquerque, NM.
