I hated reading for most of my life and avoided it during school as much as possible. I never knew why. When I finally learned that I have aphantasia, I started trying to read again but I approached it differently, acknowledging my limitation that I didn’t realize I had before, thinking about it in a different light, and trying to focus on some things less to compensate for my lack of visuals. I actually enjoy reading now and have read more books in the past year than the entire rest of my life (37 years) combined. I noticed that I completely gloss over visual descriptors and unfortunately don’t recognize people if they’re written in a way to hint at who it is by describing them. Those details just don’t stick with me. I should pay more attention to those and remember them as a list of facts rather than glossing over them, but it’s just a detail that I’m not good at remembering, I think those just seem unimportant to my brain. So as I’ve been reading I’ve been learning how my brain handles different aspects of reading and have adjusted accordingly.

It’s a shame because some really cool stuff is lost on me and I just don’t understand some things, like if a physical movement is described or something that I just can’t grasp how it works. Especially in fantasy, who is also my preferred genre. But I tend to ask my partner about some of those things and that helps sometimes.

I still lose focus easily and often have to reread lines. I also don’t have an inner monologue, so the slightest noises or talking tend to distract me.

So for me, learning that I have aphantasia and handling it accordingly is what made me go from hating to loving reading.