The Stranger in the Mirror

Last year I wrote a poem called Slipping Away. It ended like this:

ending stanzas of Slipping Away © 2025 Ewan Croft, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 .

I already don't
Know what I
Look like,

Up is down
Right is left
And spin around!

You will see
That we have
No faces anymore.

Doll faces and
Puppet strings, Tragedy
and Comedy masks plenty.

I wrote it as a poem about mortality and the erosion of self. Death follows us all, the mind slips, we stand together feeling far apart. Those are the themes. And they're real themes, and the poem means what I intended it to mean.

But when I read it back now, I can see something else in there too. Something I was articulating without quite understanding I was doing it. The doll faces. The puppet strings. The familiar in the unfamiliar. The plain, flat statement, landed in the middle of the poem like a dropped cup:

I already don't know what I look like.

I was writing from direct experience. I just didn't have a word for the experience yet.

A few days ago, I was looking through old photos on my phone. Apple Photos had helpfully surfaced a picture of a small child – four years old, I know the exact timestamp – laughing at what I believe was a caravan park somewhere, yellow-and-black striped top, red hair, bright green grass behind him.

I looked at it for a moment.

And then Apple Photos told me it was me.

I took its word for it. Because that is, genuinely, how I found out that photograph was of me – not by recognising my own face, not by some instinctive sense of that's mine, that's past-me – but because an algorithm did the recognition my brain skipped, and I accepted its verdict. The machine did the face work. I just nodded along.

That's auto-prosopagnosia, as it turns out. And I've had it my entire life.

What It Is (Briefly, I Promise)

Prosopagnosia is face blindness – the inability to reliably recognise faces. Brad Pitt has spoken about it. It's more common than people think, and it exists on a spectrum. The outward variety affects your recognition of other people's faces; the version I have, auto-prosopagnosia, points the same broken mechanism inward. The face it fails to process is my own.

I know what I look like in the abstract. I have an inventory: dark hair that goes ginger in the beard. Tall-ish. Usually in some variation of the same grey t-shirt. I can describe myself accurately enough that someone would find me in a crowd.

The beard, specifically, is my most reliable anchor. I never go fully clean-shaven – at most trimmed, never gone. Partly because I simply like it. Partly because it puts distance between me and my teenage years, which I'd rather not revisit in the mirror. And partly – and this is the part that connects to everything else in this post – because if I shaved it off entirely, I would lose one of the few reliable identifiers I have for my own face. It would be like removing a landmark. The accommodation is almost incidental to the other reasons, but it's there.

That inventory is intellectual, though. It is a list of known facts. It is not the same thing as recognition – that immediate, automatic, wordless spark of that's me. That part is missing. In its place is a small detective operation, every single time.

The Marionette in the Mirror

Poetry is where I process things before I understand them well enough to explain them in prose. Which is why, reading Slipping Away back now, the imagery makes a different kind of sense than it did when I wrote it. The doll faces and puppet strings weren't just atmospheric. They were descriptions of something specific: the face that functions correctly, occupies the right position, does everything a face should do – but doesn't quite have the animating thing that makes it feel continuous with the self behind the eyes.

That's what happens when I look in a mirror for any extended period.

A quick glance works fine. I see what I expect to see, the information resolves, I get on with brushing my teeth. But hold the gaze a moment longer and something starts to come loose. The face stops being mine and starts being a face. Features that should feel intimate become just arrangements of shapes. There's no hostility in it – the face in the mirror isn't threatening or alien. It's simply not registering as me in the way that apparently, for most people, it does automatically and without effort.

It's like staring at a word until it stops looking like a word. Except the word is your own face, and the experience repeats every time you look.

That's the doll-face feeling. The marionette quality. Familiar in the unfamiliar – which is a line from the same poem, and which I now understand is not a poetic flourish but a fairly precise description of a neurological experience.

Growing Up Not Knowing

Here's the particular strange part: when you don't know something is wrong, you have no idea it isn't normal.

I spent years assuming everyone had to reason their way through a photograph of themselves. That everyone did the same small audit – those are my glasses, that's my jacket, that must be me – before they could confirm their own presence in an image. That the immediate, effortless yes, that's me that I was apparently missing was just something people performed, not something they actually experienced.

It turns out they actually experience it. The recognition just... happens. Automatically. Without cross-referencing the beard colour.

I found this out the way you find out a lot of things about how your brain differs from other people's: gradually, then all at once. Someone describes their experience. You realise yours doesn't match. The pieces assemble themselves into something that has a name.

The name, in this case, is auto-prosopagnosia. And discovering it felt like finding out that the smell you've been quietly noticing your whole life finally has a word.

The Autism Connection (Of Course There Is One)

I'm autistic. This is not a surprise at this point, including to me.

Facial processing differences appear fairly frequently in autistic people – not universally, not as a defining trait, but often enough to be well-documented. The mechanism that encodes faces as personally significant and distinct doesn't always function the same way in autistic brains. Which means my auto-prosopagnosia is probably less of a standalone quirk and more of a piece of a larger picture, sitting alongside other things: the eye contact that always felt faintly aggressive, the habit of identifying people by voice or gait or hair rather than their face, the general sense that faces are information-dense in a way that requires deliberate processing rather than instant, automatic recognition.

None of this is news to me, exactly. But having the specific term for the self-directed version – knowing it's a documented thing with a documented mechanism rather than just me being inattentive – matters. Not because it changes anything practically, but because it turns a vague, unexamined strangeness into something with edges. Something I can look at directly.

Even if I'd struggle to recognise it in a photograph.

What the Childhood Photo Actually Means

I keep coming back to that image. The laughing child at the caravan park, red-haired, absolutely delighted about something. Apple Photos presented it with a quiet confidence – this is you – and I believed it. I still believe it. It is, by all available evidence, me.

But here's the part that I find genuinely difficult to sit with: everyone else in the photo resolves immediately. Faces I haven't seen in years – people who are older now, or gone, or simply distant – click into place without any effort. I know them. The recognition is just there, automatic, the way it's supposed to work.

And then there's the child in the striped top. The one the algorithm flagged as me. The one who is, by every available measure, also me.

Blank.

I don't know that face in the way you'd expect to know it. I know it the way I know historical facts: reliably, usefully, but from the outside. Not from any sense of continuity or felt recognition, just from the data. Which means that in my own childhood photographs, I am the stranger. Everyone else gets to belong. I'm the one the recognition skips.

(I'm aware this sounds dramatic. It doesn't feel dramatic from the inside. It just feels like how photographs have always worked.)

What I'm Left With

I don't have a clean conclusion. I rarely do, and I've mostly stopped pretending otherwise.

What I have is this: a thing I've experienced my whole life now has a name, a mechanism, and a small amount of documented company. Other people have it too. It shows up in autistic people with some regularity. It explains the poetry metaphors I kept reaching for without fully understanding why they fit so well. It explains why I needed an algorithm to confirm my own four-year-old face.

It doesn't make looking in a mirror feel different. The gaze still loosens if I hold it too long. The photographs still require their small audit. The childhood photo is still a stranger I've been reliably informed is me.

But at least now when I write doll-face in a poem, I know exactly what I mean.

And honestly? That's more than I had before.