The Letter E is Purple #
Alison Buckholtz has a interesting look into the world of a synesthete — herself. Synthesia, which has always fascinated me, it essentially the mixing of senses. Like, as Buckholtz describes, numbers having innate colors.
I didn’t worry about colors for many years, and though I retained all of my lifelong synesthetic associations, I only rarely generated new ones. Occasionally, I met a person whose color was obvious and unmistakable, and I couldn’t shake the connection. In fact, I named my daughter Esther, in part, because her color matched her name, which to me is pink. Even now it brings me deep aesthetic and emotional satisfaction to know that she and her name are so well-paired.
Finally, in my early 30s, I read a short piece on synesthesia in a scientific journal. Decades of tension I never knew I’d carried instantly lifted. My freakishness had a name. And actually, I wasn’t a freak at all. I wasn’t the only one perceiving my surroundings in technicolor. I recognized myself in sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph.