To be fair, I hated April Fool’s Day before the brain injury and accompanying face blindness. You see, I don’t have to wait for April Fools for that feeling of the ground falling away under my feet. That unpleasant realization that something you thought was true wasn’t.
It happens a lot for me. Just recently, what I thought was two different and lovely people at church, turns out to be one single person. Face blind. This is splitting. Because we can’t recognize people, it’s easy to assume that one person in different contexts is two different people (or three, or four).
The Orcam helps, tremendously, but I have to get people programed in for that to happen, and with only a hundred faces available to choose, and the rather complex chore that adding people is, it’s an imperfect fix.
All this to say that while it happens a lot less often than it used to, I can have that April Fool’s experience come upon me any day of the year, and do. If it isn’t faces, it’s that my visual neglect stopped me from seeing something that was literally right there. Or I put the mattress on the bed upside down.
So it isn’t so much that I hate April Fools Day as I hate the feeling and the idea that folks feel entitled to inflict it on me. All that being said- Happy April Fool’s day, I guess, and I’m off to put my head under a rock for the day.
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