The Synesthete Sessions: Journeying to Acceptance
The bewilderment and adventure of living with mirror touch and other polysyns
After living over thirty years wondering why other people didn’t taste butterscotch when they said, heard, or read ‘interesting,’ learning about synesthesia was a welcome wave of awareness amidst the chaos.
I remember being in elementary school and watching a friend fall from the top of a structure we called the ‘Cheese,’ a molded concrete structure that only a 1980s playground could sustain due to its unmitigated risk of bodily harm. When he hit the ground, I couldn’t breathe. Grabbing at my chest and gasping for air, I paused feeling the tap on my back, followed by “you’re it!” Trying to maintain myself as part of the game of Tag, I took a few steps, but still out of breath couldn’t yet run. Mercifully, the bell rang and we had to adjourn inside for some Math Baseball. I didn’t have to interrupt Tag by disclosing that Craig falling from the Cheese had hurt my hip and made me lose my breath.
It would be twenty years later when I was reading an article on Richard Feynman, the scientist and futurist, in which he talked about how the colors of letters in equations created a particular organization or flow to the information. He learned that his colleagues didn’t have access to that…
