Walking up to her husband in the supermarket, Heather Sellers affectionately placed an arm around him. “Shall we have chicken or beef tonight?” she asked. But instead of an answer, she was met with complete confusion.
“He was looking at me, not smiling, bewilderment in his eyes,” Heather recalls. Unfortunately for Heather, the man was not the person she was married to, but a total stranger.
“Suddenly, instinct kicked in as another guy walked across and led me away. ‘Heather,’ he said, ‘It’s me, David — your husband’.”
Heather, a 42-year-old gifted writer and professor of English, has a rare neurological condition known as prosopagnosia, or face blindness. People with the disorder find it difficult to recognise faces, while the ability to recognise other objects may not be affected.
There is no cure, making it extremely difficult for sufferers to socialise in a normal manner and keep track of people in their lives.
Heather only recently discovered she suffers from face blindness, after enduring decades of self-doubt and fear.
“It bothered me intensely,” she says. “For as long as I could remember, I’d had trouble recognising people — even family and friends I’d known for years.
“When I was a child, I couldn’t always recognise the other kids in my class and I often couldn’t understand why these people I thought I didn’t know were so friendly to me.”
Later, at university, Heather would often call her fellow students by the wrong names.
“I’d go to movies and I couldn’t recognise the lead actors if they changed their clothes,” she says, adding, “I’d get lost easily.”
Dating also proved traumatic. “Once I went on a date with a guy to a local bar. Everything was going well until I went to the bathroom, came out and sat down again — with the wrong guy!
“Before the young man had a chance to speak, my real date — looking very angry — marched across from our table. At the time, it was all so confusing because even I didn’t know what was going on…”
For the full story see this week’s Woman’s Day (on-sale August 6)
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