Personality Colours

I find myself becoming increasingly disappointed when a singer or some such person in the public eye who I’ve heard about does not live up to the colour I saw for them. What I mean is, as I’ve mentioned before, people seem to have colours that are somtimes unrelated to just their name, so their name can have a colour but then they as a person might be a different colour (very confusing). I always find it a bit disconcerting when someone turns out to be the ‘wrong’ colour.

For example, the singer Jack Penate was very vibrant orange (because J is orange), but Jack has always been black to me so that was the first confusion. And then I saw a photo of Jack Penate and he SO was NOT orange and it was all wrong. He’s more of a fuzzy browny black in person.

I suppose it works the other way around too though – it’s quite nice when someone does match their colour, like Kate Nash. I had imagined her to be orangy brown from the first time I heard her (possibly because the song she sang was Caroline’s A Victim and ‘Caroline’ I saw as orange). It was refreshing to then see her on tv and realise that the colours I imagined weren’t a bad match for the colours of her in person.

I still haven’t been able to pinpoint what it is about a person that makes them a certain colour though. I think it will always remain a mystery.

hiding synaesthesia

The most recent conversation on the synaesthesia mailing list has been to do with hiding synaesthesia. A lot of people have reported how they have felt like they had to hide their synaesthesia from everyone including sometimes their families, for fear of ridicule, bullying or reactions from others like ‘you’re lying’.

I didn’t know that my coloured words were different, let alone had a name, until I was 19, so before that I didn’t really talk about it (thinking it was normal) so never felt like I had to hide it.

Until this conversation came up this week I thought that for the last few years I had been open about my synaesthesia. I was lucky enough to find a couple of people like me at university so it was fun to compare colours, so spoke about it occasionally then.

Now I tell people I know and trust, just because sometimes I have to explain why I get their name wrong or why I get certain words and things mixed up, but generally I keep it to myself. I suppose people assume that synaesthetes are just attention-seeking which is why I don’t mention it much.

It’s quite frustrating having to keep quiet though. If something is the ‘wrong’ colour, like for example if a graphic on a webpage doesn’t match the colour I see for the word on it, it bothers me constantly like a mosquito that just won’t fuck off. Or if a person’s name doesn’t match the colour I feel for them that can be really irritating too. And then I have to keep all this stupid annoyance to myself and it’s really distracting!

It’s a shame that some people really have to hide it because I think it’s really interesting, but I understand why. No-one wants to be laughed at (apart from comedians). I guess it’s such a difficult thing to explain that it’s easier to stay quiet.