u/Acrobatic-Self-1451

Posting fiend today! My algorithm is mostly cats and Heated Rivalry these days.

This is very niche. So curious if anyone else is in the HR fandom, either here/on reddit, or on threads or IG.

So the show, which is excellent, started with books, and was made into a 6 part tv show, on Crave Canada, and picked up by HBO in the US.

There are so many discussions about what HR means to all us "loons" who are reHeating the TV show and /or the books. I've had the hardest time figuring out why I'm so caught up in series, personally, beyond the good writing, directing, acting, the attention to scene details and significant microexpressions.

I think maybe it has to do with aphantasia? Still working it out in my mind. Because it's a book, AND a TV show, I think the pleasure of the extraordinary fanfic is in part because I can refer to the show to see how / what things look like. Because the books are so good, I can tap into the "words are all" importance to me, at the same time as experiencing how the visual media makes me feel.

A couple of people have written very professional commentary about how the experience of watching Heated Rivalry is a (from gestalt therapy) a Corrective Emotional Experience, and a profound one.

I find myself weeping, often, at both rewatches, and reading certain fan fiction, oh and rereading the books also.

If you only know the show by its sexy reputation, what's the real hook I think, is how ALL the supporting characters are decent, kind, good, supportive. There isn't any "gotcha" in the show. It's extraordinary that way. Maybe Ted Lasso comes close.

Anyway, again, curious if anyone here is in both HR and aphantasia and what their experience is. People in HR spaces are collecting how the show has influenced them, and I'm still trying to figure out why so much of it makes me cry - but in a good way.

There was a thread about those of us who have gone into careers that involve writing / words / reading that I posted in this AM and now I can't find it. I'm the one who steered into the legal profession (paralegal) after learning about legal terms of art, which I think are even better than etymology, which I loved growing up - I spend hours reading the unabridged dictionary, paying attention to etymology. A boyfriend bought me the complete large-size set of the unabridged Oxford English dictionary for my birthday because he was a lawyer / bookstore owner / rare book dealer and we both loved words.

Anyway, when I read, I can't / don't hear anything. I learned a long time ago that I have to tell people that, because if I am reading, I will miss anything being said, entirely, and that doesn't work well at work or with friends / people. Anyone else have that?

Curious to what extent other people think in words also. Like, I've helped a couple of friends lately with different things - one with a property line issue, the other with an estate issue. When we are done talking about what we know, can do, etc., I have to go home and write about it - it's my form of further helping my friends. I love doing it, so I'm not trying to stop it, and sometimes it helps my friends. I can't not do it. Anyone else, compelled to write letter / talking paper / draft a legal document in response to a discussion or request for help?

People have talked about visualization. Okay, first, I'm old -- I was working full time and was an apprentice to people who wrote books about and ran ceremonial circle events in the 1980s. I organized an event around the Harmonic Convergence (yes! good woo woo stuff -- in the San Francisco Bay Area) that had 40-50 people up on Mt. Tamalpais doing ceremonial circle stuff all day long - and we'd been doing that in retail storefronts and backs of bookstores etc. for a long time too. The point being, I couldn't visualize stuff any more then than I can now, AND I was perfectly fine both leading visualizations and participating in them. Give me words, and I can be there with the visualizers, just not with images, with words.

Also I was a meditator for many years, both Vipassana and Siddha Yoga, and meditation was possibly maybe easier if you can't visualize? I don't really know. (Siddha Yoga made a big thing about seeing the Blue Pearl in meditation, which needless to say, never happened for me and I never did fully understand what they were talking about.) Maybe not, because what you learn in any kind of meditation is that the mind is a slippery eel, and it WILL move around and alight on all sorts of random, different things in your mind and will just keep on doing it. The point of meditation is to recognize that's happening, and return to your breath / to the now. lt's always a process and always will be, I think, whether you are a visualizer or an aphant.

Curious about others' experiences.

I learned to read really young. There were 5 of us in first grade who were plopped down at one table and handed books to read while the teachers / aides were teaching the other kids how to read. I did learn about paragraphs and chapters that year, which took 5 minutes, and I think was the only new thing in reading for me then. (And I could draw what that classroom and table looked like, even though I can't visualize it. It would show the spatial layout of the entire classroom.)