When you read a book, a movie plays out in your mind, a vivid moving picture created entirely by the collaboration between your mind and the author’s words.

Until recently, I thought this was a total exaggeration. No way people are seeing the action in their minds, imagining characters and settings in detail.

I love to read so much. I love to write, too. It’s hard for a lot of people to reconcile these facts with a mind that doesn’t see a story in real time. In my defense, most books don’t give every single detail anyway. That would be exhausting. But I can’t say with any degree of honesty that this has never affected my writing.

Sometimes I leave out details or mention a detail and never come back to it because it’s only important in that scene. Sometimes my settings are a bit flimsy, more like a painting than an interactive space. And most stories I write are very cerebral; they take place mostly in a character’s mind.

All of these are things that have been pointed out to me in critiques and that I still save until later in the editing process to fix… (Sorry Editing Ryn. Forgive me!) Every writer’s got some obstacles in the way of creating the perfect story, and we can never get rid of all of them. And all people, writing skill aside, have weird quirks that we think are universal until someone else points out that, hey, most people don’t do that.

This is how my brain processes words on the page: Most of the time, I’m just reading words. I can hear them in my mind, like the voice in my head is telling me a story. Every once in a while, I see a snapshot—some boots resting on a stool in a bar. Or a character’s hair and ear and freckles. Just pieces of a moment. Very rarely am I seeing a whole scene play out.

I’m experiencing the storytelling and the story at the same time.

Side note: I think this is why I never really understood others’ upset when movies change the way a character or setting looked. For me, movie adaptations are good if they have the same feeling and capture the soul of a story. I couldn’t even say what that means, to be honest. The changes are made because of what works for different storytelling media. Again, focusing equally on the story and how the story is presented.

To be honest, this is pretty similar to how I experience reality. I only really notice certain things, and I’m usually thinking about what’s happening while it’s happening instead of just doing the thing.

I began to doubt my imagination when I learned that seeing things just as written words was not the most common way to read. Could I not picture things because my visual imagination was bad? Were my stories all narrative with no foundation? Was I delusional about my creative writing skills?

Then I discovered a condition called “aphantasia,” which means that someone is unable to conjure mental images of anything. Their mind’s eye is blind.

I think my mind’s eye has a minor cataract.

I’ve always had trouble creating visual art without a reference. Photography was much more my speed.

I also tend to remember things better if I’ve written them down or even just know how they’re spelled. For example, names. If your name is Caitlin or Katelyn or Kaitlin or any other variation of the name, I want to know how it’s spelled so I can differentiate from the other spellings. Everyone’s got a nametag in my head.

But the one thing I appreciate the most about the way I consume written stories is that I love the way the written word actually looks. I love how words look on a page or screen. I love observing how people form their letters differently.

I missed my calling as a linguist, let me tell ya. The anxiety of being wrong has kept me from genuinely attempting to learn other languages. I’ve got a firm grasp on the English language, to the point where I can edit and proofread formal American English professionally, and the way everyone sees me as a grammar nerd often makes me feel like I can never mess up. Everything that is “wrong” has to be intentional—weird punctuation, sentence fragments, improper grammar. I started to place these expectations on everything without taking into account that I had to start small with English, too. I’ve gotten out of practice of letting myself be bad at things.

Learning Spanish in grade school and high school made me feel similarly about Spanish, because I had been learning it for so long. Even though I wanted to continue learning, I was too afraid to take a college-level course. And I never saw a point to learning other languages because traveling isn’t one of my passions.

Recently, I’ve begun learning Hangul (the Korean alphabet), and I am discovering how differently sentences are formed in English versus Korean. I finally understand what my Spanish teachers had been trying to tell me: language and culture are inseparable. Available grammar and vocabulary influence how people form thoughts.

Language and reality affect each other all the time. If I know more words, I can understand more about my own reality as well as the many different ways my fellow humans experience reality.

Here’s the point: We live in a global culture, and even though this means I’m exposed to more and more unknowns, I love it. I love that learning languages can help me consume more stories in their original form. It can help me understand different cultures and ways of life with more nuance. Also, it’s just fun. At least for me. If I never have a practical use for the Korean that I learn, it will still have been worth it.

As I’ve said before, I’m a fan of the useless and random skill—card throwing, basic guitar, opening a soju bottle in a fancy way—and the same goes for useless and random information. It’s amazing how being removed from an academic environment for a few years has shown me that I can learn just to learn. I don’t need an end goal or clear purpose.

Living through a huge cultural trauma like an incredibly deadly pandemic (which, unlike the Incredibly Deadly Viper, is not a misnomer) forced me to appreciate that I could just do things I wanted to do. And I better do them when the whim hits me, because the world can change drastically at any moment. (Plus, quarantine gave me too much free time which I promptly filled with learning new things, a random boy band hyperfixation, and lots and lots of books.)

So as much as I wish I could see the same HD mental movie that most other readers see, missing out on one thing makes me appreciate something else that most people don’t notice. Written words are beautiful to me, no matter how they’re displayed or which alphabet they’re in. (Though what they’re saying can often mar that beauty.) It could be a five-year-old’s handwriting, fancy calligraphy, or Times New Roman 12 pt. font; it’s all art to me.

-Ryn Baginski