Synesthesia Freewrite #1

I guess I need to introduce what I'm about to write about. I'm going to be a senior in high school next year and need to be writing some college application essays, and I've learned enough about the writing process to know that if I sit down and say, "I'm going to write an essay," it's going to feel like I'm writing an essay. And that can be kind of dull. So I figured I'd free-write in snippets about the subject that I think I want to write about, and my snippets will be blog posts since I get a certain satisfaction out of "publishing" a piece of work online even if I have no followers on this blog and am pretty convinced that no one will read it. 

Having synesthesia has at times been like being that kid in the cheesy movie who realizes that she is different and feels separate from the world for the rest of her life.

And I guess I can't even start talking about synesthesia until I tell you what it is.

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which a stimulus to one sense triggers a reaction in another sense. For example, each letter that I see is in color--A is red, O is green, and so on. And it literally appears in color on paper and when I think of the letter. I hear music in color too--the note A is also red, C is magenta. Each day of the week has a color--Monday is hot pink, Tuesday is baby blue, and they just feel that color on that day of the week. It's always been that way, and until a certain age I didn't question that others had the exact same experiences that I did. Many people ask me, "when did you realized that you had synesthesia?" And I always answer, "I didn't realize that I had it. I realized that others didn't."

And so the life of the cheesy movie character goes. Though it's really not as tragic as it sounds; it's really something that I embrace about myself and am so thankful for, as it makes life quite a bit more interesting that I would think it would be without syn. I mean, I read words on a page and they're in color, for crying out loud, which I usually don't think about since it's all that I've ever known. But I suppose most people read in black and white, and that must be terribly boring.

This is not to sound elitist at all, I assure you. How would you feel if you realized that the entire world had black-and-white vision and you were one of the few who saw things in color? You'd be grateful, I would think. Black and white seems pretty drab compared to the vibrancy that all of the colors in the world can invoke.

I can't imagine playing music without syn. The notes on the staff are in color as well, and I'm pretty sure that the colors are a large part of my recognition of which note the music asks me to play. And then the keys themselves are in color too, and the sounds in the air as well, and it all sits in beautiful harmony. The note C on the staff is the same pink as the C on the keyboard and the note C in the air as it sounds. Now that I think about it, most people with "straight" senses don't have a connection between what's written (the music), what's there (the keys), and what sounds (the note), but I have a glorious tone, hue, pigment, whatever you want to call it, that makes the note especially...true. Clear. Tangible.

Since I've realized that I had synesthesia, I've put up with a few people who think that I'm making the whole thing up. It's pretty frustrating to battle them on the issue, for them to think that I would just invent this phenomenon for the sake of getting attention. But this isn't a sob story. My own mother thought I was making it up too, funnily enough; at a young age she says she would hear me say things like, "Mommy, the notes are in color!" and the like and she eventually asked my elementary school principal about it, and thankfully he knew. I kind of wonder what would have happened if he hadn't and if my parents would have been worried. In my studies of synesthesia I've read horror stories about parents who've taken their synesthetic kids to doctors, who then diagnose them with everything from ADHD to schizophrenia. I'm grateful that my parents embraced it, began asking me questions about it.

I truly only discover things about my own syn when people ask me about it. I remember talking to someone and listing some types of syn, such as grapheme --> personality syn, where each letter and number has a personality. Then the person asked me if I had that, and I replied no. Then she asked, "well, do the graphemes have genders?" And only then, at the age of fifteen, did I realize that they did indeed. I'd never actually thought about it. I'd just been experiencing it since I learned how to read. I walked myself through each letter of the alphabet and asked myself what gender each one was. This could sound kind of iffy, I suppose; anybody could ask themselves this and determine a gender for each letter. But there's a difference between that and synesthesia. With most people, they would have to make a conscious decision: is P male or female? But with syn, you just know. There's no if, and, or but about it; the color and gender are simply part of the letter's identity and it can't exist without that. I get mildly frustrated when someone asks me what color or gender a letter or number or note is, and I reply, and they say, "Hmm. I would've thought M would be blue," or something of that nature, and not only is M so not blue, but it's not something that I think about; it's simply the way M is. Just like to you, M has four straight lines. You don't think about it, it simply is.

That's free write number 1! More to come later...

(PS: that alphabet above is an example of what a synesthete's alphabet might look like. Mine in different, every synesthete's is different, but that's how letters appear on paper!)