I love reading this kind of thing. That's fascinating, and that last bit is really wholesome. How does glasses play a part in this?

I can't visualise things in my head, and my memory doesn't have any visual aspect to it at all. For the longest time I didn't realise that when people said to "picture this" or "picture that", they literally meant to conjure up that image in their head. My mother used to spend long amounts of time describing changes she'd like to make to the garden, structures she'd like to build etc. and I just could never follow her descriptions.

Nowadays I mostly notice that when trying to compare things. Unless something is really familiar to me, I cannot really pinpoint changes to it unless I've a kind of before/after right in front of me.

Sometimes it saddens me a little. I've a dear friend who lives quite far away and we don't get to see one another often. I'm very fond of them, but I don't remember what they look like at all, beyond general, vague descriptions.

Also face blind - I use voice as primary clue, not just pitch but intonation and vocalization patterns. I’m a big language nerd and a natural mimic, so vocal qualities stick out nicely for me and are often the only clue I need. After that I keep a list, basically, of feature descriptions that “are” a person, because oh joy, I also am aphantasic and can’t just pull up some reference image, even if individual features (possibly somewhat related in my case)

I get a LOT of false positive hits on sight alone, but with vocal cues I’m rarely mistaken.

Going missing in crowds because I don’t remember/know what the person is supposed to be wearing so I can’t recognize them on sight is the worst, and I’m short so I only see a few options at a time in a sea of people. It’s super un-fun. Fortunately by now everyone I know is fully aware that I don’t actually recognize them most of the time, and so they go looking for me.

The worst for me is when I see someone who flags all the descriptor traits for a person I haven’t seen in a while, and I don’t know if I actually know them or just have that feeling, so I feel compelled to talk to them to sort out why they feel familiar. It happens kinda a lot, especially with women who resemble my late mother, which is a uniquely uncomfortable feeling, so I don’t actually talk to those people knowing I’m probably wrong, but man that compulsion..

TIL I'm helping out by never changing my wardrobe.

Sidenote: I'm not face blind (I struggle with names instead), but I also sometimes struggle with recognizing people I only met once if I see them in a new context. Possibly because my brain doesn't fully commit people to memory unless I meet them at least twice. This is a problem, because people recognize me after meeting me once, and it makes for awkward second interactions.

I don’t think I have face blindness, but if a woman that I don’t know particularly well changes her hairstyle, sometimes I get confused.

I mean, if you're not intimately familiar with someone there's going to be things you don't notice. Late night, at the club, they just call this "Beer Goggles". Everyone starts looking hot because you lose your ability to focus on more than "You've got tits and hair, that's close enough".

Like my wife will be watching her housewife shows and I’ll be like, “Who’s this lady? She’s new.”

And my wife will be like, “That’s the same woman. She changed her hair for the talking head segment.”

Meh, the original Cinderella stories were pretty dark too. And honestly I think in a creepier way. Nothing like a saccharine story where the sweet singing birds peck out the eyes of the stepmother and her daughters.

In all the excitement she never went to the bathroom so in her panic she peed a little and slipped out of one shoe