To be so embarrassed and feel tired of being the way I am?

[VioletBam]

I've always had difficulties recognising people and have also always had problems with getting lost.

I can't recognise people that I know. Recently I discovered this condition was "an actual thing" called prosopagnosia. Most people call it Face Blindness.

I am not VERY bad with it...I know my own family for instance. But if I see for example...one of my children's teachers outside the confines of their classroom, then I won't know them from Adam.

All my life I have had situations where people would just start talking to me...and I'd have no idea who they were.

Sometimes they'd say things like "Don't you know me?" or "It's X! From Y!" and get annoyed.

Well it's just happened again. I'm in Australia and it's day here. I was walking down a street which is long and eventually leads to my own. There had been a procession in the village...and DD and I were returning.

A woman was walking behind us...she smiled and caught up with DD and I and said "Do you take the short cut or go the long way?"

And I looked blankly at her and said "I usually go the long way or I get lost...but how do you know where I'm going?"

Then DD said "Mum! It's Emily's Mum!"

Emily is DD's friend...she lives on our street...three doors up. I have this woman's number...she has been round to my house to collect her DD. I've met her husband. I've met this woman about 30 times since we moved in a year ago.

I decided to be open and said "I have face blindness" and she just laughed and carried on chatting.

Does she now think I'm a weirdo or rude?

It's happened SO often. I also get lost all the time. And can't recognise our car or the cars of other people I should do.

I'm sick of it!

Yeah, you can't tell everyone.

At work, Dh has a lot of people appearing who go 'hey, have you done that thing for me yet?'
Unfortunately he can't reply - who are you again?
He's better on phone and email of course- but he gets sent to American office a lot and this is a nightmare for him.

^^
What 53rd said.

Ive got this but not as badly. I tell people, lots of people, and my husband knows to help me out with names and who people are. Happens all the time...

I also have the variant of this which means that as well as not recognising people I’ve seen casually, I also get people with a slightly similar appearance mixed up. (And the same with similar names too - I confuse names from the same country or with the same initial.) I have three slim blonde colleagues and I get them mixed up if I see them individually though I know who’s who when they’re together. I will feel proud that I’ve recognised Person A only to realise after I have said the wrong thing that I was talking to Person B. Can’t tell you how much embarrassment and difficulty that’s caused me! I am often to be found in front of the photo board at work trying to remind myself what someone looks like before I go to talk to them.

And I don’t recognise my own DS reliably, in a crowd I may think another child of a similar age and build is him. I’m not good at recognising characters in films. I used to be totally unable to recognise politicians on telly but some cartoons really help me with that, the cartoons pick out what the person’s unique features are.

I am disappointed that Google Glass didn’t take off because my killer app would have been a reliable face recognition program - something that flashed up the words “this is Sarah Jones, Emily’s Mum” in front of my eyes.

I got totally blanked on the bus by a friend of mine who I’ve seen every month or two for years and I did recognise . I went through the list of explanations from “did I offend her” to “is she really worried about something” and it was only later that I found out she has near-total face blindness and we’d have had a nice chat if I’d waved at her at called “hi Friend it’s LittleMiss”.

It’s comforting to know there are lots of us out there and I''d love to know what coping strategies people have developed. And nice to hear the different variations. I’m fascinated by you super-recognisers too!

Ooh exactly the same! But I have noticed it is starting to improve in the past couple of years I'm not sure how though

Can I join in??? Useless with faces until I know someone well, and they are in context.
I also avoid loads of reality TV and things in a similar vein, as just too many people in it . So compleatly bypassed big brother and the like. Is that linked, or just part of "me"?

Salty you asked about whether people liked reading etc. My answer is yeas. I prefer reading or writing to actually socialising and I'm very well read.

Humble but satnav can't help when you're walking :D

I can't drive anyway. I get lost in my local town centre whilst shopping!

I used to keep an A to Z map in my bag. Now I have a phone, a data plan and Google maps. The blue dot is me. Satnav for pedestrians

And I love to read, too.

I have it - and after years of covering it by basically smiling at everyone - I've become much more open about mentioning it. I don't obsess about it - but will mention it in certain situations, especially if - say - I find a work contact lives near me an thus I might bump into them in a non work context. I tend to work out people from hair and noses.

I have this too - completely unable to recognise people if I see them out of context - will realise I vaguely know the face but am unable to put a name to the person or even remember where I've seen them before. I quite often have conversations with people then go home to dh and repeat what was said to try and work out who it was

Where I live it's quite sparsely populated and everyone seems to know everyone else so it can prove very embarrassing! I'm also involved in scouts and quite regularly have people say hello and I don't know them from Adam!

I also have aspergers and I assume it's just another one of my quirks

I wonder if this is the origin of all those threads - mum at school gate was really friendly, then blanked me next time I saw her

I have it very very very mildly. Films definitely an issue. At the start of our relationship, DH would (understandable) get pissed off with my endless asking questions throughout the film ('if you stop talking and watch the bloody film you'll find out!) - until it became clear I had missed entire story arcs because I hadn't realised two characters were the same person / different people.

I always joke that the Godfather films were particularly difficult (all shifty looking guys in identical looking boxy suits and hats) - and in Narcos I had absolutely no chance, as both the lead baddy and the lead goody had very similar moustaches!

I'm consistently astonished that someone I've met once or twice can recognise me even when I've drastically changed my hair cut and colour since we last met, because hair is a very big way I recognise people. I'm inwardly thinking 'how on earth do they know it's me when I look so completely different??' - to which DH has to gently point out that I have the same face, which is the feature people are remembering

I havent RTFT so apologies if this has already been said, but I have this to a certain degree and one tip I use is when confronted by someone who seems to kniw me I say, Im sorry what was your name again? Then if they say Roger or whatever, I say oh no sorry, I meant your surname. Then at least you have a name!

My Mum does this all the time, she's always been like it. She was the head of a junior school and when we were out and someone said hello, I'd whisper, "That's XXXX, XXXX's Mum."

Tell as many people as you can and once everyone knows they won't think it's odd.

X

"DeadGood, I appreciate you're trying to give helpful advice, but honestly it's really just not possible to explain it to everyone you meet every day."

I know. That is why I made a point of saying "When you are introduced, if it's more than just a passing intro and you get chatting, simply mention it as something they should be aware of."

Of course you won't be able to explain it to everyone. I'm not stupid. Just because I don't suffer from this condition doesn't mean I have nothing valid to contribute.

If you tell someone and they choose to continue to be offended, as someone else wrote, then that is on them. At least you would know that you had done all you could to avoid their feeling of upset, and don't need to feel embarrassed (which is how the OP says she feels).

I have this. I usually identify people by other features like hair. It was awful when I worked in a school and could never keep track of who all the parents were since there were so many of them (I worked across several year groups) - if I hadn't had a previous conversation about their child with them, chances were I wouldn't know whose parent they were even if they seemed familiar. I really dreaded being asked to do 'home time' with the younger children.

Similarly with films - I can't tell all the young white men with brown hair apart! I have no idea how people who I haven't seen in years recognise me, and then it's embarrassing since I have no idea who they are. I've accidentally insulted people I know by walking past them on the street (I usually have headphones in due to sensory issues, and don't expect to be spoken to on the street, so I'm oblivious to it).

I'm not calling you stupid Just gently suggesting that it might not be as simple to deal with this as it can look from the outside. "Just tell people!" sounds like it should solve the problem of feeling embarrassed/inadvertently offending people, but in reality, it's not that easy.

DeadGood what stops me telling people I've just met is that it seems like oversharing.

People with say...dyslexia don't have to say "Nice to meet you! I'm Tom and by the way I'm dyslexic!"

I feel that sometimes, the confession would be unnecessary as I won't perhaps have cause to chat to ALL people I'm introduced to again.

And look what happened to me today! The woman never acknowledged what I said at all and I felt embarrased.

I did this test and only scored 5.

www.testmybrain.org/index.php

I have a bit of facial blindness, not as bad as OP, but it's hilarious.
I have to laugh when I do it. What else can I do?
I am weird. I am cool about people thinking that, coz it's true.
The car thing: I have to memorise the features (colour, model) & the number plate, street name, nearest landmarks. Else check the interior contents to see if they are mine!
Don't take it so seriously, OP.

Re getting lost: Temple Grandin talks about turning around to look at the reverse route, whenever she drives somewhere unfamiliar. So finding ways to remember what the route will look like as she makes her way home.

I have this to a lesser extent. My dad has it worse than me and I'm pretty certain DS1 does, too. All three of us are autistic so I suspect for us it's connected to that.

I can relate to all white men with dark hair in films looking the same etc.

DS1 often shouts, 'Look it's XXX' when we're out and it's totally not. Recently he thought a Middle Eastern man we passed on the way to nursery was my brother/his uncle. My brother is Caucasian.

Thing is, DH has the total opposite. I read a thing about 'super recognisers' or something once and I'm sure he's one of them. We'll be watching a film and I'll be struggling to figure out if a character is new or someone from earlier in the film and he's there saying, 'That extra in the background was in a perfume advert when we were teenagers.'

Total opposites!

I scored badly too (12) but it's a very US and celebrity culture biased test. I have no idea who at least a quarter of them were.

I have this. Strangely, my recognition works in context. So if I see a mechanic in a garage I visit a few times a year, I'll recognise him. Or if I see a worker in an agency I'm with, I'll recognise them. But outwith those situations I am unlikely to recognise them at all.

I have this, but never knew there was a name for it.

It makes work very difficult sometimes, because I am constantly bumping into a large rotation of various people who should slot into that well-known-acquaintance zone. I end up awkwardly hovering in an 'introduce self or not' decision process, waiting to see if they will show any signs of recognising me. I'm sure I have inadvertently offended/hurt a lot of people by 'blanking' them.

I am also forever having conversations with people I don't know (can't recognise). This has sometimes led to issues when the person talking to me actually is an over-familiar stranger and I had initially assumed they must know me.

Most recent example - took my child to see his new school, a lone dad with his son kept going out of his way to approach me and strike up what felt like over-friendly conversation. I took this to be flirtatious and remained polite but fairly cold.
When I returned to our house, I recognised the dad with son letting himself in to his own house... two doors away. This man has been to our children's birthday parties, and we have exchanged neighbourly greetings for years. Just didn't recognise him out of context at all.

Was an early, self-taught reader, and still read massive amounts (and enjoy it), so interesting to see that the two things could be linked somehow.