Image: bingo card labeled “bad at being a person bingo”
For the sake of describing this card through a narrative, the columns from left to right will be letters A thru F, and the rows top to bottom will be numbers 1 thru 5.
Squares
1A: i don’t know wtf is going on
1B: LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY THINGS OMG SHINY
1C: elaborate daydreams
1D: something is wrong but i don’t know what
1E: why is my backpack full of rocks and papers from a year ago
2A: puts things down; where’d it go
2B: scared of human
2C: having a body is weird wtf
2D: is suddenly really good at a particular thing for 3.2 days
2E: i’m tricking people into thinking i’m one of them
3A: am i just not trying hard enough
3B: doesn’t eat; why do i feel bad
3C: error 404 motivation not found
3D: stares at wall for an hour
3E: walks out into the snow without a winter coat
4A: “why can’t you do this?” i don’t know
4B: on second thought that was a terrible decision
4C: time goes slow and then fast
4D: walks into wall
4E: World’s Most Messy Room
5A: sorry i didn’t respond to any of your messages for six months
5B: weird sense of humor
5C: how do i tell if people like me
5D: how are other people so good at talking
5E: idk if i’m coming off as creepy all the time
Edit: I just realized that I absentmindedly relabeled the columns from BINGO to ABCDE. I like mine more anyway.
Idk, that’s always how you hear them represented. I just assume there’s a visual component to get people “lost in thought”, cuz while I drift away, most of what I’m conscious of is how I no longer have a way to rejoin a conversation; anything I’m thinking about would require explanation, but I’m aware of what’s going on around me generally.
Being aphantasic and not realizing it until I was… in my late 20s…? Really called a lot of things into question and I still don’t have answers for them. Like the phrase “close your eyes and picture…” I used to think it was like…metaphorical? Turns out they actually mean picture the thing in your mind.
I think visual daydreams are just the most common type, so that’s what people tend to describe. I don’t have aphantasia and yet I often find myself getting lost in imagined conversations with people I know, or mentally rehearsing how I would teach/explain something, or trying to optimize a build or loadout in whatever video game I’ve gotten interested in lately. None of that feels any different from a typical daydream in terms of experience; I’m just using my imagination verbally or logically instead of visually.