It’s Me
When I tell people that a color sounds funny they usually give me a look like, “Don’t ever ask me on a date,” or “Dude, go take a nap.” I don’t hold strange looks against anyone. I realize how crazy it may seem; colors don’t “sound” anything. They’re just colors, right? Well, for people with synesthesia, that’s not true.
Sometimes synesthesia is called cross-wiring. It comes in various forms and intensities. Researchers don’t really know what causes it, but people that have it (Synesthetes), don’t think the same way as other people do. That’s not just an opinion either; their physical brain pathways are different. I could write for days on the problems it’s caused me, and all the joy it’s brought too. See, my brain wires for sight and sound are crossed. Everything I hear has images, everything I see has a noise. That’s my variety.
I first discovered I had it as a junior in high school. I was driving with my family and the name of a friend’s mother, Ramona Styce, came up. I said, “Her name looks like a gypsy dagger wrapped in a red and a blue piece of silk.” Everyone gave me their own variation of those weird looks I mentioned earlier. I didn’t know why they were so confused; it seemed perfectly reasonable to describe what I saw. Why didn’t everyone else tell me what they saw? When I asked that very question the reply confused me: “Names don’t ‘look’ like things,” they all told me. As long as I can remember, sight and sound have always gone together. It’s almost like two manifestations of the same sense. When I said that to this car full of people, they all decided it was great fun to spout words and random noises and make me describe what I saw. That got old real fast.
I’ve had trouble making sense of the world the way people think I should my whole life long. When I was five and asked my mom if I had to eat the toe of the bread she thought I had just gotten mixed up. It wasn’t clear to her until this year that in my mind if the heel was at one end the toe surely must be at the other. Part of the problem was that I thought everybody thought the same way I did until that experience in the car.
Understanding why my teachers didn’t understand why I didn’t understand what they were saying took some real effort to get past. I’m sure it took some effort for you to get through that sentence; now you know what I felt. I had to bend my brain in directions it didn’t like to go. It made me think I was stupid. Turns out I was just different.
Synesthesia has done beautiful things for me too. Music isn’t just something to listen to. It’s something I can see and feel almost palpably. The screaming bursts of golden fire as the mountains light with day are doing just that; it’s not just pretty imagery. That’s really how it is for me. I remember people by their color or their texture; not just memorizing name plus face. Everything I see or hear has another sense connected, building a bridge of association right into emotion. The phrase, “Life is beautiful” means different things to me than to other people.
Most people’s reactions when I tell them of my personal phenomenon follow the same pattern: a bit of, “You’re nuts,” followed by, “Are you making this up?” a dash of, “That’s so weird,” culminating in either a blank stare of dis-understanding or a string of positive adjectives connected by their wishes to experience the same. It’s a double edged sword; it comes with unique struggles and unique blessings. I don’t know that it’s better or worse than anything else. It’s just the way it is. I’ve never known anything different. At least not until recently.
This summer I was given the chance to go caving with a bunch of climber friends. The cave we went to, Spanish Moss Cave, is about three hundred feet deep straight into the heart of a mountain. It makes you realize how indomitable mountains are; there are no holes. There are no cracks or slits of light. There is no way for the outside to get in except through one small entrance, a tunnel hundreds of feet through winding corkscrews and caverns lined with silver and gold in minute spirals of crystal so delicate they seem to breathe. In this absolute removal of the outside, someone suggested we all turn out our lights and be silent for a moment, just to see. And see I did: an utter absence of sight or sound, so thorough it might have been tangible. I had never felt that before. All the sights of sound, all the sounds of sight, were gone. It was like waking up for the first time. It’s worth mentioning that I had been having a particularly rough time with life. Nothing seemed to be going right. All I had was stress. With this experience, I finally found peace. A kind of peace I had never felt before. It felt like an ancient well, born of glaciers too deep to be touched, had poured, cool and clear, through the volcanic torrent that had been my mind and made it still. It was as if time were a substance, like water--a darkened sea, and sight and sound were what marked it--the peaks and the crests of the waves and breakers and the winds and the rain the only evidence that the sea was there; turning them off turned off the conflict of time. It was made smooth so you couldn’t even tell it was water anymore. It was like standing on dry ground. Then somebodies stomach growled and we laughed and the sea turned back on and everything went back to “normal.”
This experience has given me somewhere to go when I get too lost in the conflict of life. Having a cross wired brain in an uncrossed world will always have it’s challenges. Having something to compare things to has made it easier. It’s funny to me that I found a foundation in the middle of the earth.
Sean,
ReplyDeleteThis is beautiful. There is a song you now need to listen to. When I heard it it was like I could hear/see God creating the world. It can be a hard song to find, but it is one of the most beautiful things I have 'seen'. It's Called "When David Heard That Absalom Was Slain" by, David Whitacre (I believe that's his name) and the best version is done by the BYU singers. Blows my mind. Thank you for posting this.