Synesthesia

I’m trying to adapt a play I wrote two years ago into a novel, and yesterday I got the idea to get a 10-pack of Crayola markers so I can color-code notes on various characters. This idea got me more excited than any adult really has a right to be over markers. And it’s not because I’m one of those hyper-organized people who gets a real kick out of needlessly complex sorting systems (anyone who’s seen my dorm can tell you that’s not me). It’s because there’s something that appeals to me in a deep, hard to explain way about matching people’s personalities to colors. Maybe it’s just that I played with brightly colored action figures as a kid, but I’ve always sort of hoped that it was synesthesia.

Synesthesia is a condition in which people associate one sense with another, so for a synesthesiac a note on a piano might evoke a color, or running their finger along a particular surface would elicit a smell. It’s how we all work, back in infancy when our brains are scrambling to figure out what the hell the world is. Most people lose it, but a lucky few don’t.

I found out about synesthesia in fifth grade, when I read The Name of this Book is Secret, which is about a secret cult who manage to reverse aging by eating the brains of synesthesiacs. Despite the strong implication that having the condition would put me on the hit list for cannibal cults everywhere, I immediately wanted synesthesia and went to work trying to convince myself that I had it.  The easiest kind, I figured, was associating people’s personalities with colors (even though personalities aren’t actually a sense), so every so often I inserted phrases like, “He’s so orange,” or, “She seems a little too purple for me” into conversation. I must have been a weird enough kid that no one paid too much attention, which is good because I might have accidentally crossed over into racist territory once or twice without knowing it. 

For years I assumed that I had the ability to see people’s innate colors and, since no one really cared, I stopped thinking it was that big a deal. Every so often I’d categorize someone according to color, but in a passive way, like remembering their birthday. It never came up until prom night, when I mentioned to my date that I had synesthesia. Her face immediately brightened as she launched into an explanation about how B minor always made her think of being hit by a balloon full of paint or that peeling glue off her fingers was the color of orange tissue paper help up to a red stained glass window. It was beautiful to hear, like her life was built on these poetic connections, a secret language lost to the rest of the world. But at the same time it hit me like a B minor chord, because it meant this whole time I’d been faking. And when she turned to me to ask how my synesthesia worked, what could I say? Sad people were blue, happy people were yellow, angry people were red? It was symbolism on a preschool reading level.

It shouldn’t have hurt me so much to find out that I wasn’t a synesthesiac, but it did. Even in those years when I didn’t think about it very much, it made me feel strange and creative and special, which is apparently all that us millennial want, according to cantankerous think-pieces (along with free health care and a trophy just for showing up). And now I was just another idiot who cared about his favorite color too much.

But maybe being just another idiot isn’t that bad. Even if I can’t explain why colors mean so much to me with some four-syllable neurological term, it still matters. And you only have to glance at the rich history of color symbolism in literature to see that it matters to people without synesthesia. There’s this quote in Dante’s Purgatorio that’s always stuck with me: “By such a curse as theirs, none is so lost / That eternal love cannot return / As long as hope maintains a thread of green.” Green’s always been my favorite color, so much so that I get seasonal affective disorder in the winter, not from shortened days, but from empty trees. That image has always stuck with me, of being trapped in a world drained of green, and striving for that single thread with all your might. That’s powerful, at least to me. Maybe that’s better than synesthesia.