Translator: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Picture the face,
picture the face of someone that you care about.
See the shape of their eyes,
the curve of their cheeks, the colour of their lips.
There is a comfort in a familiar face.
I have been known to spend hours lost in the face of my lover.
Just tracing the contours with my fingertips
as if they were a map and I was trying to learn a landscape.
Now imagine you're walking down a street,
and the same friend is walking towards you.
You lock eye contact, you smile,
and they walk straight past as if you didn't even exist.
How would you feel?
Confused?
Maybe angry?
Or hurt?
I make people feel like this a lot.
I have a condition called prosopagnosia,
or face blindness.
And despite the rather dramatic name, I'm not blind.
I can see faces.
It's just that my brain can't always recognise who they are.
You could say that faces are my great unknown.
As you can imagine,
it can lead to a pretty interesting social life.
Professionally, I'm a spoken word artist,
and I'm a public-speaking coach.
Now in both the entertainment industry
and in the personal development and presenting world,
networking is essential for success.
Let me tell you, networking when you haven't got a clue
who the person that you are schmoozing with is,
is pretty difficult.
And it gets made worse by that deep knowing
that if you were to admit that you didn't know who they were,
it could be detrimental to your career.
Socially, I blank my friends a lot.
I mistake friends for other friends who have similar defining features,
such as height, weight, hair style, skin colour, clothing style.
And for those of you who are thinking it:
yes, that does apply to people who I slept with.
(Laughter)
And yes, it is awkward.
And don't even get me started on dating apps
for people who don't recognise faces.
But it's not just awkward.
Sometimes it can be difficult in other ways too.
Like walking into a room full of people
and not knowing what your relationship to any of those people is.
It can lead to social anxiety.
It can lead to me staying close to my phone or to my journal
or to a face that I recognise.
And then there're situations like when I email an acquaintance or a friend
and ask them to be involved with or to support a project that I'm running,
and their reply goes something like this:
'To be honest, Fleassy, you blank me every time I see you.
I find you rude, self-centred, self-important, self-interested.
To be honest, I don't really want to work with someone like that.'
It turns out for me,
my greatest problem with prosopagnosia is
it turns out people don't really like to be forgotten.
It makes them question their own worth.
It makes them question my worth.
And before I'd even heard of the condition,
I carried a story that I was rude,
that I was self-centred, self-interested, so rude, in fact,
I couldn't even be bothered to take the time to remember someone's face.
It's not a nice story to live with.
So I had to find a way to deal with it.
I had to find a way to be able to have conversations and communications
with people without having them walk away
thinking that I was a really mean person or that they weren't worth remembering.
So I developed a genius hack,
and I want to share my genius hack with you.
That was 'pretend to know everyone'.
(Laughter)
So I did, I put on a mask,
and I wore this outer facade, this outer projection,
that I was open and friendly,
trying to blag my way through conversation
so as not to upset anybody,
meanwhile, desperately trying to work out who that person was.
I had a few different ways of recognising people.
One was jewellery.
I have a love of interesting jewellery.
So I quite often be able to recognise people by defining earrings or necklaces.
Another technique I had was called Mike.
He was my partner in the early 20s,
in my early 20s.
And we - I lived in Brighton in the UK at that time.
And we would go for walks down the winding European streets together,
and it's the kind of place that people stop you every couple of metres
for a chat and a hug.
And he quickly soon pegged onto the realisation
that I didn't recognise about 80% of the people that were stopping us.
So he started inserting bits of information into the conversation,
saying things like, 'Alice, so good to see you.
We haven't seen you since that party.'
Or if he didn't know who they were,
he'd cut in and say, 'Hi, I'm Mike. What's your name?'
And 'How do you know Fleassy?'
No, I didn't ask him to do that.
And when I worked out what he was doing,
I felt safe, I felt supported,
I felt like I had an ally, someone who wasn't going to judge me.
However, neither of those two techniques are particularly reliable
for a sustainable way of remembering people.
So I had to develop something else.
So what I did was begin to scan the people who were standing in front of me
for any hint or trigger that could remind me who they were.
I'd start quite gross, in the larger factors of somebody,
so their height, their hairstyle, their skin colour,
the way they moved their body.
I'd moved then inwards into mannerisms:
what they would say; how they would say those things.
All the way down to the tiny minute mannerisms
that people make to express what's going on inside them;
the little twists they make with their faces,
the way that they smile - things like this.
Meanwhile, whilst doing all of that,
I'd be trying to hold up this face of friendliness,
like I actually knew who they were.
And it worked pretty well.
Either I'd work out who they were at some point in the conversation,
or they would walk away
completely ignorant to the fact I didn't know who they were,
and I would add them to the list of people that I had forgotten.
A big problem with my genius hack
is it became really hard to connect with people
because I was wearing the mask.
But I continued like this for many years until about six years ago
when I was sat around a table of friends and people I hadn't met before.
And I turned to the person next to me, and I said, 'Hi, I'm Fleassy.'
And she said, 'Fleassy, you do realise that's the tenth time
you've introduced yourself to me in the last few weeks, don't you?'
In that moment, the shame rose up.
My excuses - I wanted to put on that mask of friendliness
and try and wiggle my way out of this awkward situation,
but before I got to do that,
she said, 'You know I have this friend
and she's got a condition called prosopagnosia,
which means she doesn't recognise people by their faces,
instead, she recognizes them by their hands.'
Suddenly, things in my life started to align,
but I never realized they've been out of alignment in the first place.
Perhaps I wasn't as rude as I thought I was.
Perhaps I wasn't as self-centred or self-involved as I thought I was.
Perhaps, just perhaps my brain wasn't as neurotypical as I thought it was.
From here I moved countries,
and I met more people who had experience with this condition.
And I didn't feel so alone.
However, with this new framework, something became glaringly obvious to me.
I was wearing a mask a lot.
And when I was wearing that mask,
when I was ironically 'saving face',
when I was keeping up this appearance of friendliness,
I was actually lying to people,
people who I cared about, people who were friends of mine.
And it was consistently leading to disconnection.
I mean I'd be spending most of our conversation
in my head trying to work out who they were,
rather than actually being with them.
And some of these people were people I had great connections with.
I just couldn't always remember who they were
outside of the situational context.
And along with this,
I'd also become particularly astute at reading people's mannerisms.
It'd become an art for me.
And I began to realise that I wasn't the only one wearing a mask,
that actually, most of the people I was talking to were wearing masks too.
I realised that for me,
I was perpetuating a life where connection was reserved
for the nearest and dearest people in my life:
The ones I recognised.
I was continually choosing a life of disconnection,
choosing that life of nice over honest, lying to make myself look better.
Why?
Because I was afraid of the unknown.
You see my great unknown isn't faces.
My great unknown is what happens
when we actually let ourselves be seen with vulnerability.
It was a thing I'd been hiding from, avoiding that whole time.
And I didn't want to live in a world of disconnection.
My personality, my passion, my art,
everything that I do leads me to connection.
It puts me directly in the arms of community all the time.
And yet here I was, choosing disconnection.
And I realised something had to change, so I tried something radical.
I started being honest.
I started saying to people,
'Hey, I don't actually recognise who you are.'
And straight away,
the first thing that happens is that their face falls.
I see them feeling hurt, and I started to feel shame.
But instead of closing up and putting on that mask of friendliness,
I leant in.
I chose to be vulnerable in the face of challenge,
and something magical happened.
They opened up too.
They leant in.
They started to take down their masks,
conversations started to move more fluidly,
and I started to become easily and deeper connected to people.
Now people actually come up to me and tell me who they are
before we have a conversation, which makes it a hell of a lot easier.
I took this into other areas of my life.
On stage,
I started to look at how could I be more honest with my audience;
how can I let myself be seen more by my audience.
With my career, I took it in to how can I help other people
be more honest with their audiences, take off their masks for their audiences.
But beyond that, and more than that, I took it further into my personal life,
with the question of, Where am I wearing a mask?
Where am I lying to make myself look better?
And is it serving me?
Or is it actually leading to disconnection?
Over and over and over again,
I was reminded
that honesty and vulnerability is rewarded with connection.
Even coming here today, to be on this stage,
when I got asked to come to TEDx and speak about prosopagnosia,
the truth is I just kind of wanted to hide.
I wanted to package myself
and to make myself in a way that was easily consumable,
that was tasty for you guys.
I actually wanted to get up on this stage
and be able to say, 'Well, you know,
my condition just makes me really open and friendly to everyone.'
But it's not true.
The truth is, after a lifetime of being on stage,
this is the first time I've told this story publicly.
And I couldn't lie to you.
I couldn't lie to you because we are all here in this room for connection.
We are all here because we believe in ideas worth spreading.
And what kind of a world would we be creating,
what kind of a world would we be living in
if we actually took off our masks,
put down the face, let ourselves be seen
and let ourselves be honest and connect for once?
So here I am.
Once again, choosing to be vulnerable in the face of challenge,
in the hope that it rewards not only me
but all of us,
with the most delicious thing in the world:
connection.
(Applause)