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In 2017, Sadie was at the grocery store with her partner Steve.
Sadie spaces out, wanders away as you do and wanders back to him just as he's throwing items into his cart.
He was in the junk food aisle just like tossing all of these snacks into our cart, which is very unusual for him.
And so I plucked out a particularly egregious item.
It was a Safeway Select brand generic peanut butter.
And I held it up and I said, since when do you buy generic?
And Steve looked back at me and he was absolutely horrified and actually looked a little scared.
And I almost like looked behind me to see what had my like six, four husbands spooked.
But then I realized that this guy was not my husband.
He was just sort of a Steve-shaped stranger who I had randomly accosted and interrogated him about his grocery shopping.
For the record, it took Sadie more than a quick beat to figure out she wasn't talking to her husband.
It wasn't like seeing someone you think is a friend waving to them and then realizing, once you get closer, that it's not your friend.
Sadie had to really stare at this random man to see who he was. or who he wasn't.
I remember really getting this weird visual perception distortion where it actually looked like his features on his face were bobbling a little bit, like they were not quite affixed to his skull.
I mean, I think it was a second of just staring at him and just trying to understand what I was seeing.
It's an out-of-body experience for Sadie.
And then it gets weirder.
When I found Steve, you know, at the checkout, I was like, you won't believe what happened.
And Steve was like yeah, I totally believe that happened, because you do that kind of thing all the time.
At that moment, Sadie thinks, what is wrong with me?
From the Boston Globe, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein. season we're talking about whether people can change and how they do it.
We've had episodes about change after moving away, a story about change through video games and let's not forget the life-altering decision to become a clown.
Today we're talking about another kind of change, the kind that comes when you figure out how to understand yourself.
Sometimes getting to know yourself involves solving a puzzle.
Today's guest did just that.
I want you to meet Sadie Dingfelder.
She's a writer and journalist.
She's 45 and lives in West Virginia and Washington, D.C.
We'll get to her very weird grocery store experience, but first, a little history.
Growing up, Sadie always had eye problems.
Basically, what we might call lazy eye, or what a doctor might call strabismus.
What's interesting is I had been told I'd been cured.
You know, I'd had two eye surgeries when I was young.
One when I was like one year old, and then second one was when I was... in fourth grade.
And really like that was the narrative that I understood and believed.
But what I didn't realize is what actually happened with that surgery.
And what happens to a lot of people who get this surgery is you just look normal to other people.
Like, your eyes become cosmetically aligned, but your brain is still not integrating information from your two eyeballs into a single three-dimensional picture in your brain.
And so, even though my eyes seem to be aligned and tracking things, I was only processing information from my right eyeball most of the time.
Many parents do not realize that the surgery is not correcting the vision problem because they think of it as a muscular issue.
But it's really a neuromuscular issue.
Your brain is controlling where your eyes are pointing, and your eyes are not lazy if one of them points towards your nose or to a wall.
That eye is actually.
Your brain is intentionally turning it in that direction to make it easier to ignore that information.
Otherwise, you would see double.
By the way, Sadie didn't really understand this until 2010, when she was interviewing a vision psychologist who explained it to her.
She certainly didn't understand it when she was young.
Still, she grows up gaining confidence.
She finds some best friends.
She dates.
She meets her now husband when she's just about 30.
She finds him at a party.
I showed up, I guess, very pretentiously with half of a book because it was such a big, fat book.
It had fallen into pieces.
It was Infinite Just by David Foster Wallace.
Yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty nerdy and silly.
But I had... So I had half of Infinite Just in my hand because I had been reading it on the subway.
And Steve saw it and he said...
He's like, you can't have, you can't read that book without doing the footnotes.
Like, what are you doing with just half of that book?
And I said, well, of course, I've already read it.
I'm just rereading it for fun now.
And so I don't need to have the footnotes in my hand.
And that was just like such a delightful, awesome conversation.
Not shockingly, these two people who bond over infinite jest turn out to really like each other.
Steve friends Sadie on Facebook after the party.
Sadie remembers being cagey about plans, flaking a lot.
But then it happens.
One day I was just, I wanted to go see a movie.
I wanted to see Milk.
Milk is the 2005 movie about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, who was assassinated.
The movie stars Sean Penn.
It is a very heavy film.
And I didn't know what it was about, really.
I just had heard it was really good.
And I wanted to go see a movie.
So I just get on Facebook Messenger because that's how cool we are.
I was like hey, do you want to go see this particular movie at this time today or whatever, like two hours from now?
And Steve was like, yeah.
And so we went and saw this movie and I didn't realize that like it was going to be so sad.
So I was just like a mess.
I mean, I was a mess.
And Steve was like, this is like such a romantic first date.
Sadie and Steve's love story becomes pretty typical.
They date a bunch, fall madly in love with each other, decide to get married.
It's around the time they get married when the grocery store event happens.
Sadie is really thrown by the experience of thinking someone else in the junk food aisle is her partner, understandably.
Meanwhile, the fact that Steve is unsurprised by the fact that it happened makes it more unsettling.
Steve basically explains to Sadie, lovingly, well, you get lost a lot.
Sometimes you don't see the details.
It's just who you are.
But Sadie's like, I think I have to really figure out why.
I mean, she just talked to a stranger whose facial features appeared to be reorganizing themselves on his face as she spoke to him.
Sadie wants answers about what just happened.
Like, I really was concerned about my brain and my vision.
And especially with that weird thing that happened with his, like, facial features.
And so I started I think most people probably would have called a doctor.
But my first instinct was to look up research articles because I used to be a science writer at the American Psychological Association.
And I still had access to all their databases.
So I I logged into Psych Info and I just started doing research there.
And I found that there's just a heap of research on face perception in particular.
And I began to wonder if I might have something known as prosopagnosia, colloquially known as face blindness.
Sadie's next step?
She contacts scientists who do work on this.
I start emailing researchers and trying to get into studies, because there's a lot of face blindness tests online but the really good ones you have to be in a study to get it.
So I emailed a researcher at Harvard and a lot of other people, too.
But the Harvard guy emailed me back and he sent me a bunch of tests to take.
And that was the first of many tests that I would fail on face recognition.
And I was really surprised because I thought I knew that I wasn't great, but I did not think I was abysmal.
What are some of the questions like what did it ask you and what did it what did you have to do?
Yeah, you know, the most famous one, it's called the Cambridge Face Memory Test.
And what it is is.
They have all of these sort of vaguely psychotic looking guys because you're not supposed to have a facial expression, you know and they cover up their hair.
They put them in like kind of hoods, I think.
And so they'll show you a picture of a dude from three different angles.
And then you'll have to pick them out of a lineup of similar looking dudes.
That's one part of the test.
There are a lot. parts to these tests and sadie is bad at all of them so as you're taking these tests and failing them i can imagine that affects your emotions like it probably feels scary like this thing you thought you could do you can't do and what does that mean like how are you feeling don't find out how bad you did till the end of the test right so like well during the test i'm like well this is really hard but i bet this is hard for everyone and then at the end it's like no this is just hard for you and um it was really i it's it was really shocking i mean i think that i was kind of upset i don't like failing tests like at some general level and and i think that i'm above average at taking tests and i it's just Wow.
I mean, it was just like constantly being faced with a reality that I didn't really care to contemplate and didn't understand how to integrate into my understanding of myself.
In 2019, after lots of tests, some that involve travel, Sadie gets a diagnosis, one of a few.
Right before I turned 40, I found out that I was face blind and stereo blind.
Tell me about being stereo blind.
What does that mean?
You know how, if you can close one eye and the other eye and the world just jumps back and forth a little bit.
My world is always jumping back and forth.
And I didn't realize other people's worlds were stable.
And I didn't realize that people could see in three dimensions in a way that I can't.
But there's more to Sadie's brain than that.
She also learns over more time that she's not visual at all.
I say that all the time.
I'm not visual.
I'm more of a words person.
But this is different.
Sadie can't picture things really.
She shared a good way to figure out what kind of visual thinker you are.
Basically she says close your eyes.
Really do it right now.
Close your eyes, unless you're driving as you listen to this.
But if you can close your eyes, okay.
Now picture an apple.
Do you picture an apple vividly, like a real looking apple?
Because when i do this exercise i picture a green, three-dimensional apple.
I could eat.
It's on a white plate.
I can immediately imagine how it tastes.
Sadie tells me this means i'm quite visual.
That is one side of the human imagination spectrum called hyperphantasia.
People on that side of the spectrum tend to be in the arts and they also tend to have trouble getting over breakups with with their boyfriends and also um, their brain sort of will just bombard them with moments from their past, like embarrassing moments, for instance.
You'll just be walking down the street and maybe you'll see something, and then, all of a sudden, you have to relive the most embarrassing moment in your life.
I think this is me.
I can see the apple just like I can see every breakup.
This is just a tendency.
It's not true for 100% of people on the hyperphantasia side.
But on the aphantasia side, that's where I'm at.
Because when I close my eyes and envision an apple, I do not see anything.
And I did not realize that other people could.
I just thought that when we talked about things like, you know, picturing a sunset on a beach or imagining your loved ones, that kind of thing, we were just speaking in metaphors.
I didn't realize that people actually have this very visual experience and they'll see something really specific, right.
Like when I close my eyes and try to think of an apple, like I am thinking of the concept of an apple.
It could be green, it could be red.
People with hyperphantasia have a specific species of apple.
And I just think it's so amazing because this is a whole mental ability.
I didn't understand that other people have.
As Sadie becomes an expert in the way she sees things or doesn't some things about life are finally starting to make sense.
One thing she reconsiders is how her loved ones process breakups.
She never really understood why friends were so sad about getting dumped.
I get over breakups really easily.
And since I assume that everyone else had the same sort of inner life and sort of mental experience and memory abilities that I have, which is to say not very good.
I didn't understand why other people have trouble getting over breakups, and I thought that everyone I knew was basically a drama queen.
This is especially true of Sadie's friend Miriam.
Right at this time, as Sadie's pursuing answers about what's happening with her brain, this friend, Miriam is having a hard time with a breakup.
Miriam is a mess.
When she came over and visited one time, and she was just, like, weepy.
Like still crying about a guy that she had broken up with like a year earlier.
He was no good.
They only were together like two months.
I would have been over him within weeks and i just couldn't understand the persistence that he had in her mind.
Until she started describing what she was thinking about and and she was telling me the story and like it was like a movie, she was you know and she was imagining like them meeting up again in a particular bar in DC.
But she had like recreated the bar and like it had different tables than they usually did, for some reason.
And he was wearing a shirt that you could see his like sexy biceps.
And like he it was just like so it was so realistic.
It was so visual and it was so vivid.
You know, and It occurred to me that my trick for getting over breakups is pretty basic.
I just don't look at pictures of the person that I don't want to think about.
And I stop thinking about them.
And I think that if you have pictures living in your head, you can't use my trick.
This brings up a major question for Sadie and her husband, which is like wait, if my husband, who I love, went away?
Is it bad that I get over it quickly?
And Sadie's own husband is thinking, OK, maybe this is a little weird.
Like, are we experiencing the same connection if it's out of sight, out of mind?
How does this knowledge about Sadie's brain change her and her marriage?
Sadie will break it down for us when we come back.
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There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, from 2017 to 2023, Sadie learns a bunch of things about her vision and her brain and her lens on the world.
In 2019, she learns she's face blind, also known as prosopagnosia.
She's also stereo blind.
She has a bit of pause in exploration because of the pandemic.
But when she gets back into the research she also learns that she has aphantasia, this inability to picture things in her mind like the apple.
Having all of this information changes Sadie because suddenly she knows herself.
I think of the episode we had last season about the sex therapist, Krista, who learned she has ADHD.
In that story, just knowing she had ADHD made it possible for her to be less hard on herself.
Krista felt better because she was like, oh, that's why I'm like this.
It's similar for Sadie.
Suddenly she has more context for her whole life.
She also has more confidence.
After getting the face-blind diagnosis, Sadie writes about it for the Washington Post and people who know her respond.
When that story came out, I started getting emails from people that you know said things like I tried to be your friend in middle school, but you were really hot and cold and I thought you just didn't like me.
And then another.
My favorite one was someone who wrote like my cousin was totally obsessed with you and we couldn't figure out, like why you ignored him half the time.
And thinking back on being a kid in middle school, I mean, I was super lonely.
I had one friend kind of, and I would have killed for any sort of friendship.
And I remembered this girl's cousin.
I remembered him walking me to piano lessons a couple of times and I thought he was dreamy.
But then he also, I just didn't see him usually.
I didn't really question it either, because in my world, especially back then, people just disappeared sometimes and you never knew who you were going to see.
But what I didn't realize is he was in my class and I was ignoring him every day at school and just sending really mixed messages.
And so I had to go back and revise like my understanding of myself and of my life story, because I used to think that the reason why I was so lonely in middle school is because, you know, I was weird and kids are mean, especially middle school age kids.
But in retrospect I mean those things are probably true.
But lot of it was also like people were trying to throw me like little friendship life rafts and i just literally couldn't see them.
Well, not literally, but figuratively could not see them.
I realized it's.
It's sort of funny because like, in terms of changing, it really changed my perspective.
It was like a big shift in understanding the world because i used to think wow, the world's really harsh.
Now an adult, this diagnosis changes how sadie is as a friend, like that breakup thing with Miriam.
Sadie finally gets it.
Miriam's one of my best friends, and I love her dearly.
But I did believe on some level that she was choosing to wallow in pain and in her past.
And I now understand that that's just literally how her brain is structured.
Like without making any decisions.
She is bombarded by thoughts and emotions and visual experiences of her past, and also of an imagined past or future as well.
And that literally never happens to me.
I've never had an experience of like smelling something or biting into a cookie, you know, and being transported to a moment in my past.
That just doesn't happen.
I live in the present tense.
And so...
Yeah, so it made me.
I just all of a sudden I have so much more compassion and empathy for my fellow humans.
Sadie realizes how in some ways she's benefited from the way her brain works.
For example, she has never really cared about how she looks.
Like she might be the first woman I've ever met who has no real substantial negative opinions about her own body.
Most of the time, at least.
I never think about how I look, unless I'm currently looking in a mirror, because I have no visual imagination.
So it does not occur to me to picture how I might be looking to other people.
And so at some level I just sort of think of myself as just like a little floating beam of consciousness with no embodiment.
And so I'm a freaking slob because I, you know, I just am.
I think that it is sort of a gift of aphantasia for some women that we are not troubled by the body image issues as much as other women are, just because we don't have that visual imagination.
So we don't even think about what we might look like.
So there are upsides, but there are also tougher questions to answer, including how her lens affects her marriage.
In no way will I imply that this diagnosis hurts Sadie's marriage.
She and Steve are going strong. always have been going strong.
But it's weird, right?
What if you found out your spouse didn't see you the way you thought they did, literally?
And what if you discovered that the woman you love would get over you fairly easily if you went away?
I want to ask Sadie about this without implying her love is any different than anyone else's.
And then, as I get into it with her, I realize something, which is that sometimes when I miss an ex, it's because of a fictional story I've invented about them.
Like they could have been wonderful.
We could have gone to Paris together.
But we didn't.
Because I can picture these things vividly.
The story can feel like a real positive memory when it's not.
This is when I'm like, shit, maybe Sadie is more capable of seeing people for who they actually are.
I am wondering if being so present and seeing literally what's right in front of you and not and not having that linger to be messed with after the fact.
If there was something very pure about falling in love with your husband because you're just taking what he's giving you.
You're either liking it or not liking it, but you're not like giving it steroids.
I don't know, maybe your own narrative could be more trustworthy because you weren't tossing all of this other crap in there.
Yeah, I think that's true.
You know, when I found out I had these things.
You know, at first I was thinking oh my God, like am I missing out on a really important, essential part of the human experience?
Because I just don't have that kind of imagination.
I'm not reliving moments.
I'm not imagining what the future might be.
And I'm also forgetting a lot of details that neurotypical people remember.
But what my favorite researcher one of my favorite researchers told me is that even though I'm forgetting a lot, what I do remember is going to be more accurate, you know, or it's going to be more likely to be accurate than a neurotypical person, because I'm not knitting together like a beautiful scene or a beautiful sort of story.
I'm just remembering sort of the bare bones, like the headlines.
So I do think I mean yeah, and it was quite a long time actually between when we met and then when we went to go see this movie.
I barely remembered, Steve.
I just remembered we had like a really fun conversation about David Foster Wallace and And so like when I re-met him, I was really starting with a fresh slate.
I wasn't going into it with any sort of fantasy.
I was just ready to meet whoever was there, you know?
Sadie says, of course, that there are dangers with this in relationships.
She doesn't always remember red flags.
And now she understands some decisions she made in her past.
Sadie says she literally can't hold a grudge.
So I had a boyfriend who lived with me for two years and like cheated on me.
I kicked him out, i hid his photos and within a few weeks i really had no emotional response.
When i ran into him on the street and i remember thinking like this is dangerous because i could get back together with him like he's still just as cute and charming as he used to be, and i, even though i know intellectually there's all this bad shit happened.
I didn't have a memory, like an emotional memory of it.
But luckily for me, all of my friends continued to be furious, furious on my behalf.
I had one friend who would walk by the bookstore where he worked and just like screaming him through the window and shoot birds.
You know, and I thought that was a bit much, but it definitely like I felt like my friends were doing the grudge holding for me and I need that.
When it comes to Steve, the man she loves and married, I find Sadie's view of the world romantic.
Because their marriage is happening now, every day.
Its strength is in what's earned in every loving moment.
The real answer to what happens when you find out your spouse doesn't see you like you thought they did.
In Sadie and Steve's case, the end result is that it helped them be more connected.
When I interviewed Sadie, she was on a book tour because she's written a memoir about her experiences.
It has the perfect title, Do I Know You?
Because Sadie has probably asked that question a lot.
Sadie was in a hotel room when we spoke in between her book events and Steve was in the room with her.
So I asked, would he pop on to talk about the marriage and his experience?
He said yes.
Okay.
My name is Steve.
I'm Sadie's husband.
The first thing I asked was when you figured out that Sadie saw the world differently, what did you think?
One thing that just stands out is how affected she was by the movie Milk.
When we saw Milk on the first date, which I heard you guys talking about, there was a scene where Harvey Milk gets shot and she was so affected by it.
She jumped in her chair, she grabbed on to me like a...
And I was just like physically like really startled by it in a way that I was surprised by.
I'd never seen that kind of reaction from anyone from a movie.
You know, that might have been my first introduction to experiencing Sadie.
Steve says that really the diagnosis changed things for the better, because now he gets her like really, which makes her even easier to love.
I don't think that either of us would say that her life was filled with trauma or anything, but just the day-to-day things that she would do.
That didn't make sense to me.
It's a lot easier for me when I understand that there's a perceptual difference.
That allows me to be a lot more understanding and patient when stuff happens.
I also know when to offer help.
You know in a way that before I might not have really picked up on it or understood it.
We like to assume that people are experiencing the world the way we are.
And thank God they're not, by the way, right?
Like, I don't need a bunch of people to walk around having my kind of anxiety.
But I do like to believe that there is a commonality of how we remember things, how we categorize things, how we prioritize things.
And that's probably just not true.
That, no matter how much we're madly in love with someone, that they are having a very unique experience from ours.
And I wonder, when you hear oh, she's going to even remember things differently, even if they're factually the same that they are that everything is different.
Like, does that feel lonely?
Does it feel validating?
Surely it's a little bit troubling to me just the theoretical idea of her forgetting me, like for no reason, you know.
I mean when you know.
Just having that framed that way I think is sort of a scary thing.
Um, but it's not a, it's not like a practical or real thing to worry about.
Honestly, like I found the whole thing to be very interesting and helpful to to know more and you know it's helped me understand kind of some of the stories that she's told about her childhood better and, you know, recontextualize some of the things that she's gone through in helpful ways.
So, you know, there's this question of like whether self-knowledge is helpful or not.
You know, and some people it is and some people it isn't.
But you know, for me, watching her going through this experience and going through it myself has mostly just been helpful and illuminating.
Sadie agrees that the diagnosis has made them closer in some ways, because everything makes more sense.
She shares that Steve has ADHD, which is something she's had to learn to deal with.
He just has piles of things everywhere.
Nothing is in a remotely predictable place.
And I cannot stand visual clutter.
Like, every countertop in my apartment was absolutely clear.
I only owned a few objects and they lived in their particular homes, because I can't find objects in clutter.
Like, that's... It's like... really visually taxing for me to even look at a pile of clothes.
And so when we moved in together, I mean it's not like I didn't know what I was getting into right.
I knew he was a disaster, and I imposed my own sort of order on everything.
The problem is, of course, that he was not able to find things that I was hiding, basically from him and myself.
Steve and Sadie work together on understanding how they affect each other.
Also, Much more importantly, Sadie says that if Steve ever went away, she would not forget him because she wouldn't let herself.
She would never hide pictures of him.
She'd keep pictures of him everywhere.
Another thing about a change in Sadie.
Since writing about her face blindness, first for the Washington Post and then in her book, she's become a spokesperson and a de facto therapist for a lot of people going through this same thing.
I met Sadie because I moderated her reading in Boston.
A few people in the audience had the same visual and neurological issues.
They got a lot of validation that night.
I think that it's really fun to be an evangelist for the wild amount of diversity that the human conscious experience includes.
So it's just been really fun to see.
You know, people say like I've always thought that I might be different in this way.
And I'm like, you probably are.
I mean, there's people who see a face and never forget it.
And then there's me and see a face and always forget it.
It's like a basic, incorrect assumption that other people have the same basic set of abilities and like internal experiences as you.
And that causes you to make a bunch of other errors in terms of understanding other people's motivations.
On this note.
When I was at this reading, I told the group that sometimes I don't recognize people and it might seem like I'm rude, but what's happening is my own thing.
Sometimes I get anxious in the world because I have bad anxiety.
So I'm dealing with that and that makes me distracted and I can't focus on the thing in front of me.
So it isn't face blindness at all.
It's just being too stressed to be present.
I'm working on it.
But the point is Sadie and I might meet the same person and forget them for entirely different reasons.
Sadie is now super aware of how different our brains can be, that while she's not seeing an apple, i am thinking about the texture of the jeans i was wearing in 1999 when i realized a guy did not love me back.
I'm also like, really curious about other people's internal lives and i believe them, like i used to not really believe the people who say they have synesthesia, because it sounds too magical and i'm jealous.
So if someone's like yeah, when I hear a note, I see floating shapes and different colors.
And I'm just like, no, you don't.
Stop lying.
And now I realize that it's like, yeah, no, actually, people are telling you the truth.
We're all struggling to be seen for who we are, for who we're trying to be.
Sadie changed because she sees herself now.
And her relationship changed because both Sadie and Steve understand their differences for real.
I'll give Steve the last word.
Everything that you learn in life, even when you study these things, kind of leads you to the conclusion that we all have the same inner experience for the most part.
And that sets up a lot of assumptions about people that I think limits the depth of our empathy.
And so that's what the experience has done for me is it's deepened my understanding And you know, with Sadie it's like deepened our relationship.
You know, specifically, it's not just about empathy, but it's just about mutual understanding.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe.
Our producer is Christina Honitou.
Our executive producer is Kristen Nelson.
Uzair Ahmed does our audio mixing and mastering.
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Like I once actually joked with a friend that I should start a business where I'll hold grudges for people.
Oh, yeah, I could use that.
I could use that.
I'll just be mad on your behalf.
I'll sit and simmer about it.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
