detached from childhood photos

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This freaked me out yesterday. I don't tend to look back at my childhood photos. A few years ago my nan sent me a photo album filled with photos of me when i was a kid as a christmas present. It's not really been an item i've treasured and has been sat gathering dust in a cupboard for a long time. Random urge yesterday to look at it. My response to it was very unexpected. There must be about 30-40 photos and I only have a memory of about 2 of them. I looked like i remember i looked, but i didn't emotionally recognise the kid in the photos. I don't see or feel the connection.

It kinda makes me feel sad and confused because i feel like i should have a connection.

I don't recognize myself in childhood photos either. I remember when they were taken, but the person in them doesn't look like "me". Even as a kid, I didn't like how I looked in photos. I felt it wasn't "me".

This sounds familiar to me - not just regarding old photos, but my autobiographical memory in general. Memories of my past life can seem almost as if I learned them from reading a Wikipedia page about myself. Most of the salient facts are there; I know what I did, how it fits in with events before and after etc. But I don't feel connected to them, as they contain hardly any emotional content - recalling the memory doesn't give me any sense of how I felt about anything, and I always struggle to place memories in time, or to recall which people were around me at that time.

My personal explanation is that this has to do with alexithymia and aphantasia. I struggle to identify my own emotions, and there is often a lag between experiencing something and realising how that event makes me feel. Because events and the associated feelings are somewhat separated in time, I get the sense that the memory of the event gets recorded in my brain without any feelings attached; and when the feelings do come later on, they never quite get glued to the right memory of the event. At the same time, aphantasia means that I don't "see" memories played back in my head as if I were experiencing it all over again. Memories are strengthened by recalling them, so I think that this inability to "relive" them probably contributes to them fading into vagueness.

I think there might be 2 or 3 photos of me that I can stand, and I don't tend to keep family photos.

I also generally don't 'recognize' the photo as myself, but then I struggle with recognizing my own reflection as 'truly' me. If I could get away without having a mirror, I would (but I cut my own hair because people touching my head is a non-starter)!

I wonder if, in addition to alexthemia and aphantasia, this might be a form of prosopagnosia?

I don't recognise myself in childhood photos either. I don't even recognise myself in adult photos, or even looking in the mirror (that guy in the reflection does not reflect who I really am does he?) but I do recognise photographs of landscapes/locations where I've been years ago. I can still see the images of many past trips in my mind as clear as they were yesterday.