To most people, words are just meanings. “Cellar” and “basement” seem interchangeable, right? To me, the former is a hostile, yellow-brown old woman, while the latter is a well-groomed, warm presence. That difference is how I know I have synesthesia.
Synesthesia is often described as a blending of the senses, where one sense is involuntarily triggered by another. These associations are automatic and consistent over time. Some people see colors when they hear music; others link personalities to numbers, letters, or words. There are two forms: projecting and associating. Projective synesthesia involves seeing colors in physical space, while associative synesthesia – the type I have – produces colors in the mind’s eye. Still, definitions like these never quite capture what it feels like.
For me, synesthesia is constant and specific. When I listen to music, I see colors, textures, and shapes shifting together, like a painting being created in real time. Emotions have colors too – right now, mine feels like watercolor green.
I also experience ordinal linguistic personification, which means words have genders and personalities. “Midnight,” for example, looks intimidating but is actually gentle and shy. When I write, I avoid putting words together if they seem to “disagree” with each other. Words often carry colors, and sometimes textures or even tastes. I tend to avoid ones with unpleasant colors – like “cellar,” that same yellow-brown I mentioned earlier. Voices add another layer: the same word can shift warmer or cooler depending on who says it, as if their voice places a filter over it. Languages add the final film – words can sound more or less saturated in different languages!
People, too, have colors. First impressions create them, and they shift slightly as I get to know someone before settling into something stable. My relationships have colors as well – deeper connections appear darker and more saturated, while fading ones grow muted.
My synesthesia isn’t just “interesting” – it shapes how I move through the world. Because my daily life is so much more colorful than most people’s, I experience things in ways that can seem unusual from the outside. It has boosted my creativity, giving me a constant stream of sensory inspiration. Synesthesia also strengthens my memory. I often rely on color and personality associations to recall information, so I usually spend less time studying than others. Vocabulary tests, for example, never required much effort – I didn’t memorize definitions so much as recognize the “right” word by its color and character.
But this constant layering of sensation isn’t always helpful. In a noisy crowd, I’m almost guaranteed to get a headache from the overload of colors and textures competing for attention. Even writing can become difficult; sometimes I can’t bring myself to use a word because it clashes with another, even if it’s technically the best choice.
Still, the hardest part of synesthesia isn’t the sensations themselves – it’s explaining them to people who don’t experience anything like it. There’s a gap between what I perceive and what I can put into words, and even the people closest to me don’t always fully believe or understand what I’m describing. How do you explain that a word has a personality, or that a sound has a texture, when those ideas don’t exist in someone else’s reality?
And yet, for me, they do. Words are never just definitions, and sounds are never just noise. “Cellar” will always be someone I’d rather avoid, and “basement” will always feel amiable. Synesthesia doesn’t change what the world says – only the color of its voice.
