Pre-disclose face blindness
If you don't recognise faces out of context, not greeting someone in the street reads as snobbery and quietly damages relationships. Head it off: on meeting someone new, tell them that if you don't speak to them when you pass, it's the face-blindness, not rudeness — and ask them to approach you first.
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Prosopagnosia (face-blindness), which often travels with aphantasia, means faces aren’t recognised in isolation — only context and routine make people identifiable. Without a heads-up, walking past someone you actually know reads as being a ‘snotty cow’, and the cost is real damage to relationships you never intended to slight.
The fix is a single pre-emptive line on meeting someone new: ‘If you see me in the street and I don’t speak to you, speak to me — it may be my disability, not me being rude.’ This shifts the small social burden of recognition onto the channel that works (them approaching, context, voice) and removes the misread before it can happen. It pairs naturally with using routine and fixed routes to build a familiarity scaffold for who you’ll encounter.
