What’s it like to live with synesthesia?

For those of us who’ve lived with it (I’m still unsure whether synesthesia is a condition, disorder, or phenomenon – given it feels like a universal truth to those who have it) it’s common to find others who experience synesthesia entirely differently. This is because of the variety of symptoms it can trigger.

Synesthesia is often described in the media as a scientific phenomenon that allows people to ‘taste music’ and ‘see sound’. This is certainly true in some cases – despite sounding farfetched.

Yet the most common forms of synesthesia are Colour-graphemic synesthesia, and Colour-auditory synesthesia. The former occurs when certain letters or numbers are associated with a colour or pattern, and the latter when sounds trigger people to see shapes or patterns.

In reality, there are a number of ‘types’ of synesthesia, many of which overlap. I personally experience Colour-graphemic synesthesia; numbers and letters have always been aligned with certain colours for as long as I can remember. Blue with the number 1, yellow with 2, red with 3, and so on.

Things get even stranger with Ordinal-linguistic synesthesia, also known as ‘Ordinal linguistic personification’. This is a fancy way of describing someone who assigns genders and personalities to numbers and letters.

Caitlin O’Malley has described her own experience with the condition as having ‘number friends’. Reading O’Malley’s article was like seeing my own brain unpicked and laid bare. Like me, she recalls feeling most connected to the numbers 1-11, who each have their own personas. Numbers above 11 are just ‘combinations of these ‘core’ personas’.

The reasons for developing OLP are relatively unknown, much like synesthesia as a whole. And I have felt its intensity waning as I’ve grown older. One thing that shows no signs of fading, however, is my habit of visualising time.

This capacity to ‘see a year’, as I’d put it to my mother, is called Spatial-sequence synesthesia (SSS). Psychologists have suggested that this condition is relatively common, occurring when individuals perceive ordinal sequences, whether that be time, numbers, or letters, to occupy spatial locations in the mind’s eye.

This can take the form of a circle, or – in my case – a long, colourful grid made up of squares. These squares double up at the weekend, much like a hopscotch grid, and line up to mark out the upcoming weeks, months, and years. At the year’s end, the line starts to darken and blur, before jumping right back to the beginning in January (sounds crazy, right?).

Buzzfeed’s Emma Yeomans has reported a similar experience. Although for her, time occupies a physical space in comparison to her body; ‘As the future runs to my left, it curves slightly behind me […] the past is to my right but it curves around so that between 1996 and 2000, it completes a U-turn and runs back to the left’.

Yeoman’s states synesthesia is most likely to run in families. Given my mother’s perplexed reaction to my mental time-space vortex, this isn’t the case for me, but there are plenty of online quizzes to help you determine if you have the condition.

The excitement when meeting someone who shares my sensory response to the world is unmatched. If nothing else, synesthesia has certainly informed my creativity and love of art – even influencing my decision to study Art History at university. Notable creatives who share the condition range from Pharrell Williams, to David Hockney and Vincent van Gogh.

Whether it’s pairing colours with letters and numbers, visualising time in a maze of shapes, or seeing patterns when listening to music, it’s likely at least one person you know has synesthesia – and if not, maybe you have it yourself. So it’s always worth asking – regardless of potential eyebrow raises – how your friends and family ‘see a year’.