I Have Synaesthesia (But It’s Less Exciting Than It Sounds)
Meet spatial sequence synaesthesia, the beige crayon in the box of cool, quirky brain things.
The first time I worked out something was different about my brain was during English class in high school.
“This is just a fun little exercise, nothing major. You have thirty minutes to write the opening paragraph of a story set in a time different from today.”
Pretty normal, right? Almost everyone wrote about the future — but true to form, all I wanted to do was to write about the past. I had just discovered the Colin Firth version of Pride & Prejudice and I was positively obsessed with Regency England. I picked up my pen and tried to visualise my words telling a story that gave me the same feelings as Austen. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t make the words string together at all. I mean, I’d written a whole chapter of something else just that morning, and the sentences had flown out of my fingers. This time? Nada.
Later, we handed up our work and the teacher was surprised to find I’d barely scratched out twenty words. She asked what was up, so I told her.
“I can’t explain it, I just couldn’t make the words sticky. All I saw was the calendar ribbon, but the words were just kind of floating…
