I Have Aphantasia. I Ran Design at National Banks.

I should tell you something about myself before we go any further.

I have aphantasia.

When I close my eyes, there are no pictures. None. I cannot visualise my own children's faces. I cannot "picture" a beach, or a room I've been in a hundred times, or what I'm going to wear tomorrow. When someone says "just imagine it," I am not imagining anything. There is nothing there. The screen inside is blank.

I found out at forty. Four decades of "just picture it," "visualise success," "see it in your mind's eye", gamely assumed to be metaphors, because for me there was nothing to see.

I found out most people have a screen in their head the way you'd find out most people have a third arm: baffled, slightly betrayed, and immediately rethinking every "just picture it" instruction I'd ever been given.

I Also Ran Design at National Banks.

Both things are true. And the fact that they can both be true tells you something the "creative types" mythology never will.

Design was never about the pictures.

Design is deciding. Deciding how something should be, who it's for, what good looks like, what it must never do. I've never once seen a design in my mind. I've simply decided things, out loud, in words, my whole career, and the making happened.

Design is deciding. Not picturing. Not visualising. Deciding.

The Obsession That Was Always There

Here is the part that reframed my whole life the day I understood it.

That obsession with making, the woodwork, the art, the prototypes, the website I built in Year 7, was never a hobby sitting alongside my imagination. It was my imagination. With no screen inside, the world outside became the screen. I couldn't picture the thing, so I had to build the thing to see it.

Every prototype was me doing, with my hands, what other people did behind their eyelids. I wasn't compensating for a missing faculty. I had simply routed vision through reality, which, as it happens, is the one place vision actually counts.

The thing I thought was a limitation was actually a superpower. I never got stuck in my head. I always had to make the thing real to understand it. Which meant I always made the thing real.

The Toll-Booth That No Longer Exists

For most of history, deciding wasn't enough. Between a woman's vision and the finished thing stood a toll-booth: code, capital, credentials, permission. You could see exactly what your community needed, exactly how the service should work, exactly what the app should do, and unless you could pay the toll, the vision died in you politely.

I spent twenty years watching brilliant women apologise for their capability. Watching people with vision get stopped at the toll-booth because they didn't have the technical password. Watching the gap between what someone could see and what they could make stay stubbornly, expensively wide.

Then, quietly, in our lifetime, the machines learned English.

The gap between imagining a thing and making a thing has collapsed to the width of a sentence. Describe it, and it begins to exist. You don't need to visualise it. You don't need to code it. You don't need permission from anyone with a technical credential. You just need to decide what you want, and say it.

For the first time in history, making requires only deciding and describing. Which is exactly what I've been doing my whole career. Which is exactly what you've been doing yours.

What This Means for You

You don't have to be able to picture it. You have to be able to describe it.

You don't have to be technical. You have to know what you want.

You don't have to have a screen in your head. You have to be willing to route your vision through reality, which is, as I have now spent forty-plus years discovering, the only place it ever mattered anyway.

I have aphantasia. I ran design at national banks. I wrote a book about why AI was always yours. And I did all of it without ever once picturing a single thing.

The only toll-booth still standing is the story you're telling yourself about what you can and cannot do. And that one, you can demolish with a sentence.