After discovering that I have synesthesia, I have been more aware and open verbally about my everyday happenings that are normal to me. But, somehow none of my friends experience. I seem to also get the negative spectrum as well. I have partly felt that I wish I had kept it to myself, as the negative feedback has been daunting and at times hurtful. Sharing these stories with you are not easy, and it is indeed opening a very deep side of myself.
Today, I had my first ever chocolate chai at a favorite cafe in downtown SF.
Taking a sip of my chai, I exclaimed to my friend how delicious it was. Then after a few sips I blurted out without thinking “It tastes like a rainbow!”.
After seeing so many colors while sipping my chocolate chai, I was starting to wonder why a rainbow. Why all the colors? I was strange because even though chocolate to me is a bright green, that color was not appearing at all.
Upon leaving the coffee shop, I dug deeper in the taste. Filtering through rainbow colors schemes and something that would relate to the taste. I suddenly came upon a vague image of a cereal bowl with “rainbows” in it. As the image got clearer, it was an image of me eating Fruity Pebbles at my Grandmas house in New Jersey. There was my rainbow! I was amazed at how clear the image was, and instantly after realizing the color, I tasted what was really Fruity Pebbles. The chai, reminded me of the taste of Fruity Pebbles, but instead of my brain instantly relating it to a taste, it related it to a color. Which is very common with synesthesia.
In the book Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens, the author stated that syntesthetes may have a (example:) purple H or a blue O due to a color hue when they were growing up. Or a certain color to a taste. This is what happened to me today. I first saw the colors, and then was able to trace it to a source. I cannot do this with every color or taste. It was an odd way of searching for the information. I had to go to the back of my mind and filter anything with rainbow colors and that specific “taste”. I wish I could explain exactly how it worked, but it was also a large combination of memory as well.
I had a friend last week tell me a title of a book “Pillars of the Earth” on a camping trip during a hike. I instantly saw the text in white with a drop shadow on a red background, moving from right to left. In my minds eye words or sentences are read backwards. That to me, is perfectly normal and makes more sense than when I read left to right. Somehow I was able to remember the book title, see it later in the week and find the book! It’s like a movie clip that plays over and over again. All I have to do is find it.
