Tag: synesthesia

What Do Emotions Feel Like…. Synesthesia Edition

Everyone associates synesthesia with this great, powerful gift that allows you extrasensory abilities. Indeed, the newest trend and a quick search on a search engine will make it seem that almost everyone has this. Artists have used it to create beautiful works of art, singers and songwriters use it as inspiration. And writers, oh, it grants them a gift of being able to describe things with almost inhuman detail. This gift has been proven harmless. With such beautiful creations springing forth, it would appear this strange and baffling thing is a superpower. 

For the most part, I’ll even agree. Until you begin to try and explain something to someone who doesn’t have it. Then life can get weird. I experience life in sound. Different types of pain have sounds to me (sharp pains are high pitch, dull pains are bass), even foods are sounds (chocolate is low pitch, bread is middle, lemons are high pitch. Anything way too sweet or salty is glass breaking high pitch, and therefore painful). 

I’ve based entire opinions of people based on the sound of their voice. Perhaps it isn’t fair, but I can’t help it. High pitch and nasally voices are painful, where lower tones are pleasant. Accents add an interesting spice to the sounds, and perhaps that’s why I love accents so much. 

If I’m not interpreting the world in sounds, then I’m experiencing texture, sometimes color. France, for example, feels like warm and makes me think of a lovely orange color, where Scotland feels like soft grass, and makes me think blue. 

Now that I’ve given you a road map of my brain, let’s make things even more interesting. What do emotions feel like, sound like, etc? Before I go completely into that, allow me to explain one other aspect. My mind is always noisy. There is always a dull static that surrounds my head. It’s like hearing snippets of conversation in a crowded food court, but drowned out by the roar of the crowd. I call these my potential thoughts. Thoughts, emotions, imaginary conversations, or memories I’ve not experienced yet, but lurk in the shadows waiting to happen. 

Happiness is a strange emotion. It feels loving, impenetrable, like I could take over the world. It sounds like a harmonious symphony, and laughter feels like waves of an ocean. It feels warm. 

Anger feels like ice and fire competing in my veins, with a darkness waiting behind whoever wins. The angrier I get, the harder these two fight. 

Sadness feels like loneliness. It feels like a television left alone in a dark room, with the channel playing nothing but snow. Loud static can be heard. 

Depression feels like this, but with the added benefit of clarity for the potential thoughts. There’s always a dark, twisting figure tat seems everywhere and nowhere, and this figure encourages these thoughts. This leads to the spiraling low, and the static becomes like knives. “Just kill yourself. It’ll save the world a lot of trouble. Everyone will be better off without having to deal with you. You’d be doing them a favor. No one actually cares, they humor you because they need something, want something, from you. As soon as you’re no longer useful, you’ll be tossed away entirely.” 

Bipolar low feels like…. I’m surrounded by hundreds of these figures, and they’re all shouting at me to just end it. Just do it. Which leads to, what I feel, is a level of bipolar psychosis. The world seems to be moving so fast around me, and I’m standing still. Or maybe it’s the other way round, and I’m spinning so fast I have the illusion of standing still. The world doesn’t include me, I’m an outside observer peeking into a window of reality. 

Thankfully I haven’t experienced that often. It is truly terrifying, to exist but not. To feel, but not. 

Stress feels sour, like sour milk. And the more stressed I feel, the more soured I feel. I even begin to think I smell sour, which increases the stress. 

Why am I writing this? Why am I telling you? To be honest, I have no idea. Maybe I just need people to know and understand the extra layer I feel beneath the emotions. Maybe I’m hoping someone will read this who can give answers, or can relate. Maybe I’m hoping my words can help a study. What happens when you combine synesthesia with a mental disorder. Chaos and beauty happen, of course. 

I hope this has been educational. I feel better now, at least. 

Living with Synesthesia

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog. I’m terrible at this, I realize. I have all these wonderful ideas bouncing around in my head, but I can’t seem to catch it long enough and force it down onto paper or computer screen. Or, if I do manage to pin it down, I lose the inspiration because I can’t get the wording quite right.

One thing I have realized is writing in this day and age is intimidating. Perhaps I should reword that and say Writing is intimidating. Everyone has an opinion on what is “good” writing and what is “bad” writing, and often times people pass off an opinion as constructive criticism. What I mean is…. If you take three people and make them read the same article, they’re all going to have different opinions on it based on different experiences. So how can we really tell what’s good and what isn’t? I guess that’s a blog for another time. Today I’m going to talk about synesthesia.

Until a few years ago, I didn’t realize that my way of thinking was any different from the people around me. I thought everyone had the same thought processes. For example, I think in pictures. I thought everyone did until I was talking to my mom about it, and she informed me she thinks in words. So when I start discovering that not everyone thinks of things in terms of music, my mind was a bit blown.

For those of you who aren’t aware, synesthesia is a mental condition where one sense is crossed with another one. Most commonly people will hear colors, see sounds, and so forth. To me, everything has a sound.

Foods have pitches. Chocolate has a lower sound, while anything acidic (like a lemon) has a higher pitch. Rice, or any other bland food, has a quiet note somewhere in the middle. Colors are the same way for me. I’ll describe the different shades of blues in terms of sounds. Darker blues have lower pitches, lighter blues higher pitches.

But what makes synesthesia so difficult for me? Trying to write. That’s right, the writer has a problem with writing because music gets in the way.

Indeed, if you listen to a conversation, and listen to the sounds rather than the words, you begin to realize that conversations are almost like a song. There is a certain rhythm that accompanies speech. You can tell if a sentence is a question, a comment, or an exclamation based on how the sentence sounds. It is almost like visually seeing it written down if only people listen. So when I try to write, in my mind, I’m composing a symphony. My words need to ebb and flow just right, and come together to form a masterpiece. This makes it difficult to proofread other people’s work, because their music sounds different than my own.

Because this blog is being written quickly and off the top of my head, the music sounds and feels whimsical, almost nonsensical. It’s a bit choppy in places where I’d like to extend the notes, but can think of nothing else to add to that section. As I concentrate on the way the music plays in my mind, my sentences begin to grow longer and less choppy, evening out the music. Suddenly the blog begins to take on a different melody, and I can feel a world opening up beneath my fingertips.

The real struggle I have, however, is anything dealing with numbers. It doesn’t help, I should add, that I have a bit of discalculia, or number dyslexia. To me, an equation doesn’t have a flowing sound. Numbers, ironically, sound very choppy and very disorganized. If a one has a low sound, and a nine has a high sound, they don’t go well together, even if they do make ten when added together. I have to wonder if I’d known this problem and recognized it for what it was when I was in school, would I have done better? Could I have found a way to work around it or better work with it? Sometimes problems are better solved by not working around it, but rather finding a way to use a disadvantage as an advantage. That’s probably why I need to do things “my way” rather than how people tell me to, because their rhythm and way of thinking is completely different than my own.

Why is this important to me? Important enough to write a blog about? Because my life has changed exponentially since I finally began to realize and embrace the differences in my mind. Understanding that our minds work differently than our friends can also help us examine situations from multiple points of view, especially if you are like my friends and have conversations about how you think.

Once you figure out the way your mind works, a new world of possibilities begins to open up for you, and multiple paths stretch ahead. Deeper thinking leads to better problem solving.

What I have is only one form of synesthesia, mind you. There are many different combinations! Scientists are still trying to figure out precisely why it happens, and what to do about it. Personally, I don’t want my inner music taken away, so I’m hoping they don’t find a “fix” for it any time soon. If they do, I’ll avoid it. Simple as that.

The world is a magical place if only we take the time to look and see it as such.

For those of you reading this who may be curious as to what synesthesia is, or suspect that you may have it as well, I encourage you to do your own independent research and learn as much as you can. It can make life a bit more difficult, but it can also make it a bit more interesting as well. Perspective matters.

You can begin your research by checking out the following website: https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/syne.html

I hope I’ve helped someone at least a little bit. Or, at the very least, educated someone on what it’s like living with synesthesia.