your rb about inner worlds rarely appearing on their own is very interesting to me. i also almost definitely have hyperphantasia and i don't recall anything about my inner world in my childhood / teen years, with the memory loss, but i have found illustrations i made of it when i was 10-11 years old, so i always wonder how it came about. i know i used to daydream and 'play fantasy' a lot; wonder if it was related. (im @skyritual)
so i wanna share our personal experience here a bit for context on where jade was coming from in that reblog.
iāll be so honest, and this is cringe of me but i do not care because itās true: watching sherlock in our tween-early teen years unlocked a magnificent door for us as far as headspace building goes. we were one of those ND kids who went full force on fandom, yāknow? cosplay, emulating characters in day to day life, the whole nine yards. so when sherlock did the āmind palaceā thing, we were kind of like āoh, thatās easy, we already have the big houseā (which was the first solid part of our innerworld). but that show really encouraged us to put more time into āexploringā our innerworld realmā itās always felt as if itās always been there, but, as much as i know what things seem like, iām also a man of science. i know that we were technically āimagining it on the flyā as we explored the place. weāve always āseenā it like itās a real, physical world, even if it isnāt.
the big house that i mentioned before was something we āfoundā (created) as a little kid. our old host would go there āto play with his imaginary friendsā (thatās what he thought we were back then). again, it seemed to just spawn in, but i think our child brain was just so quick with creativity-oriented things that it was easy to accept that as true.
all this to say, itās totally possible that you couldāve ācreatedā some of your headspace back when you were 10-11. and thereās a good chance that it wouldnāt have even felt like creating anything. i think when youāve got hyperphantasia or can visualize quickly, it can definitely feel like it appeared without any work involved. because the workās subconscious to a degree.
which kinda brings me back to the reblog. i think itās entirely possible for a system with hyperphantasia that has never given it any real attention to have virtually no headspace, and conversely for a system with aphantasia that puts a lot of time into it to have a vast headspace. (though i would assume itās a different experience for them, and they likely wouldnāt āseeā it, but itās still there.)
sorry that this turned into a ramble of sorts, but hopefully a piece of it is interesting or helpful at least š
