Sitting in my bedroom alone I listen to the music play quietly in the background, soft violin, and watch the light violet that swims around the inside of my eyelids like a slow moving fish. Looking at my teacher draw, he lifts his arm and in my mind’s eye a cloud of green moss encases him, pulsing a dull yellow as he speaks, I feel the color surround me. When my therapist asks, “How have you been?”, I pause before translating, “Fine,” as a looming grey and green cloud electrifies the upper portions of my mind. I look at the math equation, one plus two, and capitalize their names. From a young age, if an alphabet and numbers poster had the letters on it, A had to be red, and One had to be yellow, or it wasn’t right.

The internet cites synesthesia as “a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway” that “leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway”. This means that some people can literally smell colors, or see music, a thought so interesting and eclectic that as a society we save this kind of speak for drug users and liars. Synesthetes, a word used to conglomerate those affected make up only 1 in 200 to 1 in 100,000 of our population. Many unknowingly are affected by it, thinking that it is a normal process of their brain, while others hide it in fear of ridicule. According to Wikipedia, there are two main types of synesthesia. Projective, and associative. For example, if you were a projective synesthete, when you smelt popcorn, you might see a green square in front of you. But if you were associative, you would simply feel a very strong connection with the stimuli and think very strongly that popcorn smells ‘green’.

When I was thirteen years old I was talking about how numbers had genders with my best friend at the time. Very quickly I found out that apparently this was not something that everyone experienced. I knew no one talked about it but it made sense to me—it was just something that was. I remembered looking back at it, even at that age. Math was always an interesting concept to me—one which created stories—because I was adding people together, not numbers. One was a male, tall, lanky, with yellow straggly hair and a thin body, and thin-wired glasses. Three was a female, short and thin with bobbed black hair and a beauty mark on her left cheek. When I added them together and got four, there was a backstory to this. My best friend must have thought I was insane. I realize now that this is a type of synesthesia called ordinal linguistic personification.

As time went on, I realized many of the ways in which I interact with the world were products of synesthesia. Studies have shown that as synesthetes age, often they acquire more forms of the phenomena, and I can tell you that in the few years since my young childhood, my list has grown. The list includes: Numbers having personalities, letters having color associations, music eliciting a physical sensation across my skin, music creating colors, feeling in colors, and the one that makes me everyone’s party trick; seeing people’s personalities as color.

Now, I don’t argue that I can see auras. There is something metaphysical and energy related to seeing auras. What I see is an emotional response to my interpretation of another person’s personality. And they can change. Sometimes they stay the same for years, or change weekly, and it all has to do with how well I know the person in question. And another thing: the colors that I feel and see don’t always mean the same thing. My boyfriend is yellow; it's the most compassionate love you’ve ever felt, but when my friend and I fight and I feel yellow, it’s just sharp.

Another thing, color isn’t unaccompanied for me. Often when I see a color it comes with a texture or movement. Like my boyfriend, who I have been with for 2 and half years. When I think of him in my mind’s eye I see a soft yellow petal, curving downwards, a light purple brushed upon it blowing softly in a breeze, with a soft green and pink in the leaves below the petal. This is nothing like aura energy, where the colors mean different things about you. The color is just my expression of love and his person. And when I feel love, it isn’t always yellow for me either. Sometimes it’s a honey-esque brown, or a limey-green.

The frustrating part of experiencing this is that you’re always experiencing it. My anxiety holds no mercy in using the colors against me, portraying the crowds around me in a color that causes fear to clench my throat, my gift is not a gift. When I walk down the crowded walkways from one class to another the colors help to clog my machine that thinks, cause me to go numb as I experience too many colors as once, so I taught myself at a younger age to blur it out. When everything is grey, you may feel a sense of lifelessness, but your head doesn’t hurt anymore. When I decided to tell people about my one trick pony, everyone wanted to know their color. Not that I blame them, but I’m rusty now. I have to pause to pull out the sensation from a layer of censors put there to protect me. I don’t think you can find that on the internet.

Writing this essay was green. A dark forest green, and then a bright green, blaring in my eyesight and swimming behind my ears. Maybe it was the music, or maybe the discomfort of talking about this in full, but I want to throw up.

Sensory overstimulation is a real thing, and I stand by it. But I love the colors that create this earth. The green, the red, the blue and yellow. Through the midst of depression, and anxiety, and all the overstimulation, love of color keeps me here.