Content note: This essay contains descriptions of chronic pain, medical trauma, community invalidation, alienation, and suicidal ideation. Please read with care.
If you are in immediate danger, please contact local crisis services or a safe person.
If you are in immediate danger, please contact local crisis services or a safe person.
I cannot quote the comment verbatim because, if that person sees this, I may face retaliation. That is the world we live in: some can say cruel, illogical things, while the targeted ones are expected to absorb them without defending themselves.
As a cognitive scientist and neurodevelopmental psychologist, I have spent three decades researching how humans are formed. In all my work, I highlight that every person on this planet is unique, shaped by an indefinite number of variables, including those who are raised in the same house.
Parents change.
Circumstances change.
Relationships change.
Even twins and triplets born at the same time are not formed identically.
Caregivers have favorites. Depending on the family dynamic, particularly when it is narcissistic, one child may become the golden child and another the scapegoat. They may look remarkably alike, but emotionally, physically, cognitively, and developmentally they are not the same people.
The comment did not engage with my life. It dismissed it. The person did not say, “I appreciate your experience, but mine is different.” They said: you are wrong because your experience is not mine. They did not need me to be different. They needed me to not exist as a voice. If I had been exactly like them, they would have found another reason to complain about my post.
But I am not writing for pity.
I am writing because the right to speak cannot belong only to individuals who can defend themselves.
I learned a long time ago that people do not only reject experiences that differ from their own. As I said, sometimes they attack the person for existing. It is a zero-sum game for them.
I was twenty-seven. It was an endometriosis forum, one of the few places where you could say the word out loud and have someone know what it meant.
Endometriosis is a chronic inflammatory disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside it. It usually produces disabling pelvic pain, bleeding that will not keep to a schedule, exhaustion, pain during sex, pain during bowel movements, and in many cases, infertility. There is no cure. What medicine offers is management: contraceptive pills, progestins, GnRH agonists, injections, laparoscopy, hysterectomy. Many women go through all of it and still hurt.
Proof of severity.
Proof of seriousness.
Proof that your pain was real.
A woman who had undergone three surgeries occupied a different position in the room from a woman taking ibuprofen. A woman receiving injectable hormones occupied a different position from a woman who could not take artificial hormones at all. The medical interventions had not cured anyone and had not meaningfully relieved most of them, but they had become a hierarchy.
The identity of victimhood was all these severely ill women had left.
One woman asked for help with her pain. Another, a new member, said that she used hot water bottles.
That was all.
She did not suggest that anyone abandon medication. She did not claim that warmth is a panacea. She said what she did with her own body while she waited for the pain to pass.
She thought she was helping.
The response from the pack was an execution.
"How dare you say something like that. We take pills. We do injections. We have surgeries."
Her presence in a conversation that included their laparoscopies was the insult. The hot water bottle was only the pretext. As if she had said their suffering was nothing.
I watched the same pattern repeat for months, with different women. There was so much hatred and contempt that the community made me feel a billion times worse than suffering alone. I could not bond with people who could not see others.
If we cannot let each other say that out loud—if people must first prove that they have suffered enough, suffered correctly, or suffered in the approved manner before they are allowed to describe their own lives—then the rooms we build to save each other become one more place where we cannot be honest.
At almost fifty-one, I know what is left after that.
You retreat from civilization.
I did, five years ago—alienated.
But I still need to make a living, and the only way I know to do that is to put my work into the world.
But, hey, according to aphantasia research, lack of visual imagery is just an intriguing variation in human consciousness.
I am so sick of this.
The truth is that I was not born for this world. If this is what civilization entails, I want no part of it.
Every moment of every day I have to deliberately stop myself from ending this dark subsistence.
P.S. 1
It took me six hours to write this terrible essay. In isolation, with a failing body, writing is not redemption.
My published work—spanning memoir and analysis—engages themes such as narcissistic abuse, trauma, personality disorders, toxic relationships, communism, immigration, C-PTSD, and more. The full collection is available here: Cristina Gherghel on Amazon.
Caregivers have favorites. Depending on the family dynamic, particularly when it is narcissistic, one child may become the golden child and another the scapegoat. They may look remarkably alike, but emotionally, physically, cognitively, and developmentally they are not the same people.
The comment did not engage with my life. It dismissed it. The person did not say, “I appreciate your experience, but mine is different.” They said: you are wrong because your experience is not mine. They did not need me to be different. They needed me to not exist as a voice. If I had been exactly like them, they would have found another reason to complain about my post.
People say that when you put yourself in public, others are entitled to express their opinions. Of course they are. But having an opinion does not remove the obligation to recognize that another person is speaking from a life you have not lived. Disagreement does not require the cancellation of the person who deviates from you.It took me three years to gather the courage to share work I had written in isolation because I could barely muster the energy to breathe.
When I speak publicly, dismissal does not simply remain outside me. My panmodal aphantasic mind cannot replay the scene, construct an imagined rebuttal, or hear an internal voice telling me that I can withstand it. Endless dismissal therefore meets no internal counterweight. It lands and stays as fleshbacks.I know how that sounds. It sounds like whining. It is.
But I am not writing for pity.
I am writing because the right to speak cannot belong only to individuals who can defend themselves.
That is why everything I publish is advocacy for humanity: for the recognition of each human being as singular, irreducible, and entitled to speak from their own experience.A Special Kind of Violence
I learned a long time ago that people do not only reject experiences that differ from their own. As I said, sometimes they attack the person for existing. It is a zero-sum game for them.
I was twenty-seven. It was an endometriosis forum, one of the few places where you could say the word out loud and have someone know what it meant.
Endometriosis is a chronic inflammatory disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside it. It usually produces disabling pelvic pain, bleeding that will not keep to a schedule, exhaustion, pain during sex, pain during bowel movements, and in many cases, infertility. There is no cure. What medicine offers is management: contraceptive pills, progestins, GnRH agonists, injections, laparoscopy, hysterectomy. Many women go through all of it and still hurt.
What I did not expect was that this absence—the fact that nothing works—would become the raw material for a vicious religion: suffering.
In that group, what you had borne had become proof.Proof of severity.
Proof of seriousness.
Proof that your pain was real.
A woman who had undergone three surgeries occupied a different position in the room from a woman taking ibuprofen. A woman receiving injectable hormones occupied a different position from a woman who could not take artificial hormones at all. The medical interventions had not cured anyone and had not meaningfully relieved most of them, but they had become a hierarchy.
The identity of victimhood was all these severely ill women had left.
One woman asked for help with her pain. Another, a new member, said that she used hot water bottles.
That was all.
She did not suggest that anyone abandon medication. She did not claim that warmth is a panacea. She said what she did with her own body while she waited for the pain to pass.
She thought she was helping.
The response from the pack was an execution.
"How dare you say something like that. We take pills. We do injections. We have surgeries."
They were not defending medicine. Medicine had already failed them, and they knew it. They were defending the position those medical intercessions had given them. When a disease is incurable and when the pain is chronic, the question of who is suffering most becomes one of the few questions that appears to have an answer.It is a terrible answer because it requires the suffering to continue. It requires the wound to remain open because the wound has become the credential.
Her presence in a conversation that included their laparoscopies was the insult. The hot water bottle was only the pretext. As if she had said their suffering was nothing.
As if she had spat on them.
She had not. She had said what she does.
And they went for her throat.
She had not. She had said what she does.
And they went for her throat.
I watched the same pattern repeat for months, with different women. There was so much hatred and contempt that the community made me feel a billion times worse than suffering alone. I could not bond with people who could not see others.
I left.
It is one thing to be blind in the mind’s eye and another to be blind in the soul.
By the time I was forty-five, I found that trauma and abuse communities had their own versions of the same religion. Anyone whose account of their own life diverged from the accepted one was attacked. But the divergence was not the cause. The cause was that the person existed. Anyone who coped differently, did differently, healed differently, or did not heal at all was treated as a threat to the group’s story about itself.
I call this pattern malignant victimhood: what happens when people have been hurt and have turned that hurt outward—instead of metabolizing it—until they have become the thing that hurt them. Victims who prey on their kind, going for the throat at every opportunity. Cannibals.But why would we be surprised if your own parents and your own siblings can do this to you? There is no reason to expect better from strangers simply because they happen to share your diagnosis.
Society normalizes abuse. For me, none of these things are normal. They should not happen in a civilized society.
I know you think this, too. But what power do we have?
Poverty is not equal in its effects.Pain is not equal in its weight.
There is a hierarchy of suffering, some of it heavier than others, and some people are carrying more than anyone should have to.
I say this as someone who has had endometriosis since I was nine, and not one day has passed without excruciating pain. I popped pills like there was no tomorrow – because my aphantasic mind could not even imagine one.
I would still never have told that woman that her method was wrong, offensive, or abusive.
It was her way of coping. It helped her endure.
I was happy for her, and tremendously sad to watch suffering human beings destroy one another.
The ranking of struggles is not the same thing as the ranking of voices.
A woman can be suffering more than another woman without acquiring a greater right to speak. Someone can have suffered less and still know what their own experience feels like.
I say this as someone who has had endometriosis since I was nine, and not one day has passed without excruciating pain. I popped pills like there was no tomorrow – because my aphantasic mind could not even imagine one.
I would still never have told that woman that her method was wrong, offensive, or abusive.
It was her way of coping. It helped her endure.
I was happy for her, and tremendously sad to watch suffering human beings destroy one another.
The ranking of struggles is not the same thing as the ranking of voices.
A woman can be suffering more than another woman without acquiring a greater right to speak. Someone can have suffered less and still know what their own experience feels like.
Someone can cope differently without invalidating the way another person copes.
Someone can describe their life without making a universal claim.
Once a community decides otherwise, it stops being a community and becomes a pecking order with a technical vocabulary.
Anyone who speaks outside it, who says this is what I do, this is how it feels for me, becomes a problem simply for existing not just as a separate voice, but as a different human. It's like we occupy too much space. Like we have no right to exist on this planet.
Once a community decides otherwise, it stops being a community and becomes a pecking order with a technical vocabulary.
Anyone who speaks outside it, who says this is what I do, this is how it feels for me, becomes a problem simply for existing not just as a separate voice, but as a different human. It's like we occupy too much space. Like we have no right to exist on this planet.
Every life is different.
Every mind is different.
Every body is different.
No two people survive the same thing in the same way.
Every mind is different.
Every body is different.
No two people survive the same thing in the same way.
If we cannot let each other say that out loud—if people must first prove that they have suffered enough, suffered correctly, or suffered in the approved manner before they are allowed to describe their own lives—then the rooms we build to save each other become one more place where we cannot be honest.
At almost fifty-one, I know what is left after that.
You retreat from civilization.
I did, five years ago—alienated.
But I still need to make a living, and the only way I know to do that is to put my work into the world.
So I speak.
But speaking is not the same as being heard. In fact, daring to speak means exposing myself to abuse. And without mental imagery, there is no internal world to house or protect me. I cannot hide in a chamber of my mind and hug my inner child, who still trembles to this day.
Anendophasia means I have no inner voice to serve as a sympathetic chorus.Aphantasic experiences are as varied as the experiences described above. Some of us have other people who can hold what we cannot hold internally while we are present with them. Neurodivergent individuals do not all experience their minds, their relationships, or their lives in the same way. That variation is precisely what I wrote about in Not Born to Write.
For me, supportive voices stay outside. They cannot be replayed, held, or summoned. That is the curse: support cannot enter, but harm cannot leave.
But, hey, according to aphantasia research, lack of visual imagery is just an intriguing variation in human consciousness.
I am so sick of this.
The truth is that I was not born for this world. If this is what civilization entails, I want no part of it.
Every moment of every day I have to deliberately stop myself from ending this dark subsistence.
P.S. 1
It took me six hours to write this terrible essay. In isolation, with a failing body, writing is not redemption.
P.S. 2
This was originally published here: https://cristinagherghel.substack.com/p/not-born-for-this-world-on-aphantasia
I am Cristina Gherghel, author of numerous blogs and books dedicated to neurodevelopmental psychology, human behavior, trauma, abuse, philosophy of mind, and mental health.
I share my perspective not only from the standpoint of rigorous research but also through personal experience, living with multiple forms of neurodivergence from the Aneurothymia Spectrum (and related conditions).
Terms coined by me:
- Panmodal aphantasia
- Asensoria
- Avalidia
- Atelosia
- Analytheia
- Altrudynia
- OMES (Ontological Metabolic Exhaustion Syndrome)
Terms already existing in literature:
- Anauralia
- Anendophasia
- Anhedonia
- Asexuality
- C-PTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
- And others
The conditions described are insufficiently understood in the specialized literature. Current explanations for their causes are often inconsistent with how they manifest in lived reality.
This is why I am developing my own model, based on observation and comparative research, which analyzes the differences and overlaps among these neurodivergent conditions and their connection to early trauma, ontological abuse, and subtle forms of self-instrumentalization.
This article is part of a broader ongoing effort to clearly differentiate between these conditions — not only as clinical definitions but as lived experiences with a profound impact on thought processes, relationships, perception, and identity construction.
Thank you for reading and supporting for my work.
Dive Deeper into the Research
My full research papers and thesis can be found on all scholar platforms, for example:- Aphantasia Is Not an Advantage in Long-Term Abuse: On the Trauma of Fleshbacks and the Myth of Coping and Defense Mechanisms is available to read for free on Zenodo. It presents the complete argument, evidence, and theoretical framework.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17692334
- The Zero Point of Narcissism: On the Conditional Nature of Panmodal Aphantasia as an Autopoietic Outcome of Amirroring
Join the Journey
My research is ongoing. I share regular insights, updates, and deeper dives on my Substack. Subscribe to follow the journey as the work evolves.https://cristinagherghel.substack.com/
