A Personal Essay
The word dissipate is male, tall and lanky, and prefers solitude to companionship. Auxiliary, also masculine, feels athletically superior to his peers. Certain words are dramatic extroverts who love the limelight, others quiet, observant introverts. One of my strong suits has always been vocabulary-- I was the second-grader who could define and spell dissipate and auxiliary for the whole class. Words jumped off the page and embedded themselves in my brain, and I knew and remembered them as one would friends: they were brash, insecure, boisterous, or pacifistic.
I’m affected by ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia. I only discovered that it had a name a few years ago, but this I’ve always known: every object that enters my consciousness possesses a specific, detailed personality. Each doorknob, each pen, each letter on the page has a gender, an attitude, and a few defining characteristics. Although I’ve read that it stems from an intermingling of my cognitive and sensory pathways, my synesthesia is neither distracting nor overwhelming. Instead, my recognition of each object’s complex personality is instantaneous, and concurrent with whatever else is going on in my head.
During grade school, I was surprised to discover that not everyone knew the red couches in the school’s lobby to be petulant, self-absorbed, mustachioed middle-aged men. In retrospect, I was lucky: most synesthetes never realize that associating colors or personalities with sounds or objects is extraordinary. While I recognized that I possessed something special, my 12-year-old self wasn’t interested in exploring this characteristic that set me apart from my peers. I figured people wouldn’t understand, or they’d think I was crazy. I even worried that I’d be forced to take medication to drive the personalities away. I brought it up with my parents only once. In a way, the That’s nice, dear I received was worse than anything I expected. The experience left me feeling invalidated, and even more convinced that this part of me was something I should ignore in the same manner they had. That day, I resolved to tell no one.
Yet English is a blue subject, with short-cropped hair. It’s self-assured in an unobtrusive manner. Math is red, short in stature, and constantly defends its masculinity. History, purple, a woman trying to prove herself in a field of men. I saw the identities of everyday objects, I knew words intimately, and the complexity of the world around me burned bright.
As I grew older and continued my formal education, I began to realize that my synesthesia, rather than being a disturbing force in my life and studies, helped foster a deep love of English and other languages. I become emotionally connected to syntax. I truly fall in love with certain words. Catharsis. Acquiesce. The Spanish word for chorus, estribillo. I am enamored by their humility, their strength in the face of adversity, their quiet resilience. It’s a lonely love affair, though. Try explaining to your sophomore history teacher that you use hyphens in your writing because you admire their spirited unruliness, because you love them.
It’s difficult to describe how a word’s definition dovetails with its identity-- the best I can do is to say that a word’s personality and its definition are like two birds flying around in my consciousness, swooping and diving, sometimes spiraling upwards together and other times veering off along separate airy courses. In my writing, I constantly search for the perfect word to convey my meaning-- the sheer variety of words in the English language astounds me. The way words fit together in a sentence is of the utmost importance-- never have I been able to let an inharmonious phrase sit on the page. My synesthesia enriches my experience; it makes my life infinitely more layered and intricate. The world as I know it is in constant fluctuation, with every new encounter providing an opportunity to see things in a new light.
