Building Headspace 2.0 (Aphantasia edition)
Summary: “Most people, perhaps 80 percent, primarily see their parts— they interact visually. […] Between 10 and 20 percent of people almost never experience any internal visual imagery. Ironically, Dick [Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems] is one of these people. All of the sense modalities are ways we can experience our inner world. People feel body sensations, hear voices and sounds, see things, and experience intuition beyond normal sensory modalities. Pretty much everybody is capable of experiencing this inner world except perhaps in cases of organic brain damage, and there I am uncertain.” —Bob Falconer, the Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession, pg. 123
Series: Essay (Bootstrappery section)
Word Count: 2130
Notes: Winner of the 2025 August fan poll, supported by fans at LiberaPay and Patreon! This builds on ideas in Building Headspace and Headspace Discovery and Defense, but it can be read on its own.

We’ve gotten a bunch of comments on our headspace essays that boil down to, “I have aphantasia; what do I do?” Well, I’m Rogan, I made a lot of those essays, and go figure, turns out I have aphantasia, so let’s take the bull by the horns!

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Mori: After the end of my real-life bar graphing bacchanalia (lying on the floor, surrounded by books with tits and ass on the cover), I found myself having one of those 1AM conversations with my headmates: what makes a book cover truly EROTIQUE? What is that je nais se quoi and other fancy French words that give it the oomph?

( this is the horny comic book equivalent of a bunch of wine aficionados talking in snooty Boston accents about the fine details of their stale grape juice and how great it is. )

Bob: my birthday’s in two weeks, and Rogan asked what I wanted. My response? All the food I am not allowed to eat in my old, bad-heart body. Fried food, desserts, fat and sweets and flavors.

Today, he was at the ice cream shop, and one of the specials was Xtabentun coffee ice cream with anise/honey liqueur. Coffee and booze: my favorite combination! (And wasted on these kids; Falcon is the only one in this place who appreciates a decent cup of coffee asides from me.)

I staked my birthday claim early. I got my ice cream. Oh, it was an experience to be savored, for sure! Best ice cream I’ve ever had... and their body can take it no problem.

Happy early birthday to me!

Today I just realized that All in the Family ISN'T just plain invisible or "Error 404" when people reach it. People see the takedown notice and since I very obviously don't do photorealistic art, kinda the only conclusion to draw is that my work is "Content glorifying sexual violence" or "minors, minor-presenting, or suggested minors in a sexual context."

This is incredibly degrading. This might be more humiliating than getting shadowbanned from Gumroad for Cultiples, and that was pretty damn crummy.

I make mental health work about sexual trauma. It's bad for business to have "minors in a sexual context" as code for "child pornography" anywhere near me professionally, even if you ignore that this is, again, a memoir about how incest fucked me up. The whole point is that it's awful! Josie Riesman called it "one of the most brutal and engaging comics I’ve ever read." Tarun Athmika did a whole fucking paper on the politics of implication in (among other things) All in the Family, and how bans of discussion of oppression supports that oppression! Holy shit, he couldn't have been more prescient had he tried!

I've still heard nothing from itch.io. I ordered my payout a week ago and it's still "in review." I don't know if I'm going to get paid. The idea that I might get pedojacketed, AGAIN, for totally nonsense reasons is...

I don't know what it is.

This never used to happen to me until 2023, and now it's becoming normal to me. This is just life to me now. And I feel stupidly naive that it took this long to happen; it feels like it was always going to.

At least I can take comfort that the Banned Book Sale is going well. But god, I would've way rathered never throwing one.