The Taste of Grey

"How many fingers do you see?" My mom would ask as she held up any random number of fingers from across the room. She did this on a daily basis to measure the strength of my 'weak' eye and to determine whether the patch I was wearing was working. What she didn't realize was I could taste the end of matches when she wore a specific grey shirt and when she asked my dad if he wanted iced tea, I tasted fresh cut grass so potently I would stick out my tongue to grab at imaginary blades of grass.

As I grew and began learning words and reading - it was hard to navigate around the colors I saw with each letter and when the letters were pulled together to make words the individual colors would leave and the word became black. When I started to learn the days of the week or the months of the year - there was an immediate color association that remains intact today. On any given Tuesday, I open my eyes and simply acknowledge this day would be orange on a calendar. It is a similar process for each month of the year. Some names have colors associated with them. The name Steve is always yellow. Richard is red and Simon is black. The most entertaining aspect of my condition is hearing music brought on by certain food smells. It can make dinner difficult or working lunch meetings almost impossible. The most debilitating part of my particular synesthesia is the mirror touch aspect which makes the suffering of others my own suffering in a very real way. As you can imagine an average day is very busy in my head as with other #synesthetes. It can also be very isolating as you usually feel alone among a room full of people and you choose wisely when explaining what you are experiencing. I never thought to talk about this openly and it was only recently after experiencing #ayahuasca that it became very obvious how much shame I had around certain aspects of this condition. I would begin to tell people in small doses only recently and would gage their reaction to make an immediate determination if I should carry on. I usually would use some type of humor to cover up the utter discomfort I felt. So, What is this? How does one get it? What can you do to make it go away?

Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which a person experiences crossed responses to stimuli. It occurs when stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (e.g., vision) leads to automatic involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (e.g., hearing). Approximately 4% of the population have some form of #synesthesia. There are approximately 60 variations scientifically known today. (Psychology Today)

For most of us, I don't believe we would change this way of experiencing the world and we've each become very creative in finding ways to overcome certain aspects. I found beautiful things to be my source of calm while others have found their own unique ways. Creating awareness creates the community and expressing among other synesthetes is an incredibly healing way to bring a bit of light to an otherwise silent way of living.