I wasn't always aphantastic. I've already talked about it in another aphantasia thread here on HN, but when I was a child I was actually hyperphantastic: I would spend endless hours playing and directing vividly realistic (albeit silent) movies behind my closed eyelids. Sometimes (not always, but on a particularly good day), I was able to visualize things/creatures with my eyes open and have them interact with the real world.

If I wanted to see a rabbit, I didn't have to consciously recall facts about rabbit anatomy, behaviour and movement patterns like I would today (only to end up with most of them wrong); I just thought: "let there be rabbit" and with no effort at all there it was. Not a rabbit-like creature you would expect from a child's drawing, but an actual, realistic, anatomically correct rabbit hopping about the way rabbits do.

This ability started to gradually disappear around the time I went to school. I remember my frustration when I realized it was getting harder and harder to picture things and the quality of those pictures was getting lower and lower. Eventually I ended up not being able to visualize anything at all.

I've been wondering about this lost childhood superpower of mine for years, way before I even heard the term "aphantasia". When I say I'm aphantastic, I don't compare myself to some idea of how other people's minds work. I compare myself to what my own mind used to be capable of.