Hope. Hope is quiet and loud, wild and thoughtful, a kind of sea foam green/mint. This it what makes Hope:
H: itβs a warm letter, kind of yellow/pink. It sounds like a high pitched woman about to laugh. O: itβs a cool color, like a deep blue at the bottom of an ocean, but not that dark, and it sounds like an older man with a very deep voice. P: P is a warm color, very rich and velvety. Itβs a deep, rich orange, bright and dark at the same time. And E: E is usually a warm color, like a dirty yellow (a highlighter that's been ruined by another color) and is ugly. In hope, E is soft, warm, and cuddly, like a child's voice...
My condition is rare; mainly because it is 2 different kinds of synesthesia put together. I have ordinal linguistic personification, and grapheme-color.
Let's translate those to English, shall we? The first one, ordinal linguistic personification, or OLP is when one associates gender and personalities to months, days, numbers and letters. So for example, for me, J is a loud, flashy, outspoken letter like its sister K, that sounds a bit like someone shouting with excitement. (She can be a bit of a brat sometimes, when paired when A.)
And the second one, grapheme-color, is where I associate numbers, words and letters with colors. For example, January is a very pale, light grey-lavender.
Honestly, I have no idea why I hear the letter's voices.
Is life hard like this? Not really, no. When read, itβs never like I see dozens of different colors clashing together, and hear a clamoring of voices. The colors blend together and make a new one, like how the deep blue of O and the yellow/ pink of H in Hope make a sea foam green. It doesn't happen when I speak, read or write Japanese. Just English.
I knew it wasnβt normal, from a very early age, just listening to people around me. But, I kept it to myself because I was a quiet, secretive child. I would have lengthy discussions in my head about why N was so boring and why L was soβ¦ different. When I was around eight, I developed a kind of system to the (slight) madness occuring in my head.
Words that sounded like E or A, or letters that ended in those sounds were most likely always βwarmβ colors. Words that ended in O or U or Y and the letters that ended in those sounds were always, always, no matter what, βcoolβ colors. Letters like L, X, M, N, I, well, they were all some shade of light grey. Bland. Neutral.
It was the same for their personalities. Warm letters were loud, or comforting, motherly and bright. Cool letters were distant, gloomy, quiet, thoughtful.
My synesthesia has always been apart of me, and has always inspired me to write. This is the first time I have written about my synesthesia, so obviously it is not what makes me write.
No, my synesthesia makes me want to write because it looks so pretty when my thoughts are on the page. Blues, greens, pinks, yellows. Once, I challenged myself to write a story and make a rainbow.
Was that hard! It went from the warm spectrum, because there are so many warm colors, and then made it cool. It looked a bit awkward, but it was so, so gorgeous.
Sometimes, I wonder how people can live without color. In my life, color is everywhere. I canβt imagine life without synesthesia.
I hope this has provided you with an insight to my life as a synthest, and showed you that synesthesia is not a disease, nor a curse, but something wonderful, beautiful even, that deserves to be studied.
How can we discover the secrets of the outside universe, if we have not yet discovered the secrets of the universe that lies inside of every human?
Author Notes: Hi. I'm Faithful, and this essay is about me. I really do have synesthesia. Does anyone else on here have it?
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