My Colorful World
Image courtesy of Tori Hinn.
You wouldn’t have picked her out of a crowd. And, though she looked and acted like any other teenager, she saw colors. They extended from people’s bodies in halos of light, reaching out into the surrounding air only to be cut off by an invisible forcefield, one that closely contained the illumination. Each person had a color, often more than one that mixed and merged with other shades; sometimes colors morphed into another and, other times, they hid. But when there was a color emanating from a person, it told the girl volumes about their nature and demeanor.
Bright red light emanated from the woman pushing past the crowd to her right. The woman wore a blazer and pencil skirt with her hair slicked back, and she was unapologetically barking orders into her cell phone. That’s what red was. Passion. The girl knew this woman had an inner sense of power. She was confident, strong-willed, and likely more than a little stubborn.
The man playing guitar on the street corner also made the girl’s vision swim with red, but this red was fainter, dancing along the exterior of the magenta shade it was masking. The magenta only blinked through when he strummed his instrument, singing a song that she’d never heard, slow and sad. The light red overlay told the girl that this man had suffered in his past, and it was still affecting him to this day, but the magenta told her that he was an artist, creativity bursting out from his pain.
As the girl passed a cafe, a woman sitting at the table talking loudly to her friends caught her ear, and then, soon after, her eye. Bright orange danced around the woman’ s unnaturally blonde hair as she clamored to share her newfound interest in Pilates. The girl shuddered and turned her attention elsewhere. She didn’t like orange people much. They often had selfish motivations and craved attention; they usually couldn’t look beyond their own perception of the world.
A gust of wind pushed the girl’s hair from her face and made her eyes water as she reached her father’s office building. A handsome man in front of her, wearing a suit and a smile, stepped back and held the door open for her. “Good afternoon,” he sang with a twinkle in his eye, a sunny light gleaming from his body. “Thank you,” she replied, stepping past him and into the silver building. This man used kindness to conceal another side of himself; he was unsure of who he was, so instead he just became who he thought he was supposed to be. Yellow meant she couldn’t quite figure him out, although she knew he wasn’t a bad person. He just wasn’t quite himself yet.
The girl moved past, only coming to a stop to press the “up” button for the elevator. A stocky man with glasses came to stand beside her. With his left hand he flicked the keys to his Mercedes Benz around his pointer finger, and with his right he scrolled on his phone with a concentrated scowl. The elevator arrived and this man, who was overtaken by a bright emerald green, entered in front of her. Green whispered that this man was logical, and most likely had written out a step-by-step plan for his life to get to where he was. He was driven by success, and knew what he wanted and what he had to do to get it. She rode up to her destination quietly, so as not to disturb him with her existence.
She stepped off the elevator and walked through the front doors to her father’s office. The receptionist greeted her plainly from behind the front desk where he kept bowls of chocolate candies for people to take. She smiled and waved at him—and his royal blue halo. She normally saw royal blue surrounding doctors at hospitals, but the man at the front desk had it, too. He wanted to help others to make himself look better, or perhaps for the success that may come with it. Perhaps he was aiming for a promotion.
Her dad was sitting at his desk in the corner office. Upon entering, he looked up at her and smiled, a real smile unlike the ones she passed outside, and she stopped looking for the colors, because that smile was all she needed to see.
I thought it was normal before I discovered otherwise. I thought that everybody saw a halo of colors around people’s bodies. To me, it was a part of who people were. I felt like I knew a person when I saw their colors—not that I analyzed this much when I was younger. In my first clear memory of the colors, I’m four years old, and the meaning behind the colors didn’t matter to me at all. What mattered was that Ms. Pane, my preschool teacher, was orange, bordered by a dark, angry red. I remember the colors floating around the classroom like a colorful cloud moved by the gusts of wind created by her purposeful strides. It was even visible when I clenched my eyes shut during nap time. Sometimes I dared to unburrow my head from the nook of my elbow and peek out through squinted eyes to take in my darkened surroundings. But I knew I had to be careful: Ms. Pane would scold you if your eyes weren’t closed during nap time. So was the torment of that year of preschool before she was replaced by the kind, chartreuse-colored Ms. Collins. And while I don’t remember much from this time of my life, I remember I hated Ms. Pane and I hated her colors.
* * *
My third birthday present was indigo. My little brother, Max, was born on my third birthday; the contractions preceding his birth interrupted my celebrations that evening. He came into this world presented to me as a gift. But at the same time, he was taking something from me, for that day (and every birthday moving forward), he was also entitled to being the focus of attention. I have never resented him for it. In many ways, it has been the reason for our closeness. It’s also likely the reason for our contention. We are similar in many ways, but the ways that we have learned to express ourselves and interact with the world are very different; in times of stress, he explodes, commanding attention, while I implode, pushing myself out of view. During our disagreements, his indigo mixed with orange, the color which soon came to dominate.
It didn’t help that Max could do no wrong in the eyes of my mother. He developed a certain privileged mindset in which he could never be at fault. I can remember the little rascal headbutting me and biting my toes. In response, I called him a “baby”—which, to be fair, he literally was. This, however, offended him, and he would cry, upon which I was punished, often in the form of banishment to my room. Through my eyes, wet with frustrated tears, I would see his indigo and, at that point, a swirl of orange colors, the shimmering lights mixing around his smirking face. He had our mom wrapped around his chubby fingers, and he knew it, too. We learned that we would be rewarded for tattling on each other, and thus began to see one another as adversaries fighting for our own perspectives and not siblings looking to reach a mutual understanding. In the past few years after my mom moved out, we started trying to fix that.
He has also started to mature over the past few years, and the amount of orange present has lessened, leaving him with an impressive, compelling indigo blaze, one that consumes information and lets it fuel his next project. The counters and tables of our home are frequently covered in his (often weapons-related) projects: cardboard catapults, rubberband guns, hand-carved bow and arrows. He’s filled notebooks with designs of planes and other technological marvels. He’s always been intelligent and extremely gifted at anything he puts effort into—the catch is, he’s very selective about the things that warrant his time, and often his commitment to a given interest is short-lived. He pours his energy into a new project every few weeks, becoming obsessively dedicated to skateboarding, computer programing, motorcycles—the list goes on. But despite his bright mind and clear capacity to remain motivated, he has struggled with school, barely scraping by and hating every second of it. In my family, we joke that Max is either going to be living in one of our basements or one of his crazy ideas will take off and he’ll become a billionaire. I think it depends on which color wins in the end—orange, or indigo. I hope it’s indigo.
* * *
No one else seemed to talk about colors, so I assumed throughout my early years it was nothing special. In middle school, I read The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott. It was while flipping through its pages that I was introduced to the concept of “auras,” and, for the first time, realized their absence in other books I had read. Auras, though, were something that had been negatively associated with “hippie beliefs” by a boy at one of the summer camps I attended. Some believe that they surround all living things as a field of energy radiating from the body— a part of the being’s spirit that has leaked out of its form. Despite having seen something reminiscent of this ‘energy’ for as long as I could remember, I wasn’t sold. I figured out Santa wasn’t real when I was two-years-old (all by myself; don’t worry, no one ruined my childhood), so I wasn’t about to put my skeptical beliefs into auras. Needless to say, reading Scott’s book opened my eyes to two facts: (1) no, I’m not normal, and (2) yes, I might be a crazy hippie that no one would believe if I admitted to it.
I kept my world of colors a secret. The people I did tell often thought I was lying about having a “superpower” of some kind, dismissing it as a cry for attention. Either that, or they would ask me what color I saw for them. Sometimes I would have an answer and sometimes I wouldn’t. I began to notice that people’s colors would usually only appear to me once I could get a good read on who they were when no one else was around. A lot of times, it would be through a flash of authenticity in a conversation. Sometimes a person would unconsciously mutter a mean comment under their breath. I’ve also noticed bursts of color surrounding uninhibited laughter. How a color reveals itself can sometimes be more telling than the color itself.
* * *
During my sophomore year of highschool, I tried to share my world with three of my friends. “You wanna hear something kinda weird?” I said, and they turned their attention toward me. “You all have yellow auras.” Using the term “aura” was my first mistake because, to people who haven’t done the research into the various religions and cultures that accept them as a fact of the world, believing in auras is for people who don’t conform to society, or believe in sound, logical science (“hippies”). I also think telling all of them at once was another mistake. The group dynamic caused them to bounce their thoughts of disbelief off of each other and rationalize that, “No, Halle, of course you wouldn’t lie, but maybe it’s just the lighting in this room.” “Yeah, maybe that’s it…” I replied.
I began thinking that maybe I was just imagining these colors. Was I looking for them so hard that I was seeing them? Was I faking this? For a while I began to ignore the colors, and the more I did this, the less I saw them. When they would decide to appear, they were duller, as if they were no longer excited by my awareness of them, as if we shared a mutual resentment. The more I loaded my brain with other things to worry about, like school work, family fights, college applications, the less present the colors became. I was losing my connection to the world around me. I had retrained my brain to see the world without them, but the colors still occasionally peeked through—unexpectedly, like a hot, summer day in October—despite being less vibrant than they had once been.
Then, in the fall of my junior year, I got sick, and in my weakened, near-death state, the colors, once ghosts of their former selves, disappeared altogether.
* * *
I completed an independent study of disordered brains during my senior year of high school. After taking a neuroscience class the previous year, I was hooked on learning about the inner-workings of the mind. One of the first books I read was called Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains by Helen Thomson. Unexpectedly, the third chapter of the book related closely to me, and I realized I wasn’t some crazy spiritual guru whose opinions could be discarded for their lack of credibility (thank goodness). Instead, I had synesthesia. My brain made a connection between the region registering the emotions I experienced when interacting with others and the part of my occipital lobe that perceives and interprets colors. The colors were simply a result of an inefficient misfiring of signals. My experience, which others might call into doubt, is explained by science. It was a relief, to say the least. But, at the same time, it was demystifying a part of myself that I had always found to be special. I think a part of me always expected to at some point be approached by a celestial being or maybe an alien from a distant galaxy that would provide me with answers. In a way, the explanation felt anticlimactic.
Interestingly, I’ve found that when my brain doesn’t have enough energy, it doesn’t prioritize this connection, and I don’t see the colors. I have also found that as I’ve gotten older, I see the colors far less frequently than I once did. This is explained by a process called “synaptic pruning,” where as you age and your brain develops, your mind’s pathways become more efficient.
This made great sense to me, with the exception of one of the colors I still see: the red overlay.
* * *
My mom was the first person I told about the colors. I knew she would believe me, because she was convinced that rocks affected one’s chakras and aided illness. I remember that when I had a concussion, she suggested I put a rock under my pillow while I slept so that its healing powers would be right next to their target. I obliged for a few nights, willing to try anything to get the throbbing to stop. To my knowledge, the rock didn’t help much. Needless to say, my announcement didn’t surprise her. Her immediate response was, “I always knew you were powerful, from the moment you came out of me.”
Although she tries to be a kind, thoughtful person (and often she is), my mom has struggled with anger in the past. She didn’t have an easy childhood. She spent most of her teen years living at friends’ houses and sleeping in the pool house she worked at during the summers to avoid going home to her abusive mother. Throughout my life, it’s been difficult for me to determine my mom’s color. Maybe pink, or yellow, or even orange. But I knew a mother—my mother—wasn’t supposed to be orange; they wouldn’t make others feel invisible or invalidated or use their kids to fill their emotional needs, right? It went against everything she had always advertised about herself, so I squandered the image, or convinced myself I wasn’t really seeing orange—it didn’t make sense. But that was because most of the time, especially when she was angry or yelling, the air around her was overtaken with a red light that was impossible to ignore. I call it a red overlay.
It’s unlike the bold red color that normally hovers around people; this red is hesitant. I’ve noticed a red overlay in some other people too, whether it be a man on the street corner or a friend at school. I know nothing of the peoples’ histories or past traumas, but I know of the traumas’ existence. I have found, after getting to know these people, that the red overlay spoke true to their life experiences.
Synesthesia is supposed to be my mind’s colorful embodiment of how I connect to someone else, but the red overlay doesn’t conform to this. How could I know of someone’s past before they told me of it? Perhaps it’s presenting itself based purely on intuition. Growing up with my mom, around whom I’ve often had to walk on eggshells, made me very aware of the emotional states and potential triggers of the people around me. I can’t help but feel that this awareness has played into my ability to subconsciously perceive things about others.
* * *
My dad has a lot of tans. He’s stable and responsible, having held the same job for over twenty years. I wish we connected differently because tan is a boring color. He deserves to be rainbows and sparkles. But he’s beige.
He has been there for me all the times I’ve needed him most. Like when I got sick the fall of my junior year, he was there with me every step of the way—even when I tried to push him away. He took me to all of my doctor’s appointments, and did everything he could think to do to get me healthy again. When I began to recover, and the colors started to show up again, the first hue I saw was beige.
Researchers have discovered that the average color of the universe is beige. They’ve described it as the “Cosmic Latte.” So maybe tan isn’t so boring after all. Maybe my dad’s color is the universe.
* * *
My synesthesia has been a fundamental and prominent part of how I see the world. Although at this point, they rarely present themselves to me, I still don’t perceive the colors as something different, or “other.” The colors have never dictated the way I go about my life; they have merely been present. Although, I will admit, their presence has caused me to question many things about myself that I otherwise may not have. And my interactions with others have likely been impacted, not by the color per say, but by my perception of the people that would elicit a certain color to appear.
Still, it’s hard for me to imagine my life being different had I never been able to see them. I like to think of it as similar to how bees can see the world differently than us: what we perceive as a yellow flower instead looks like a rainbow, luminescent bullseye to them. But they likely don’t think twice about this bullseye or even consider that any other creature may see it as anything different—they just let it lead them to collect the pollen they seek. Or how shrimp living in the deepest parts of the ocean have seventeen cones to determine color, whereas we only have three (red, blue, and yellow). Surprisingly, this doesn’t equate to their being able to recognize an inconceivable amount of color detection. The visual systems of these shrimp are one that has never before been seen in the animal kingdom. Instead of taking the time to interpret and differentiate between colors, the shrimp registers the input while quickly scanning their surroundings so they can make faster survival decisions. In other words, their relationship with color in how they perceive the world is far different from ours.
I suppose that everyone’s brain is a little different, and there is something special about how everyone views the world (everyone’s own, individual “qualia”) that differs from the rest. Everyone is experiencing their own form of reality. And while this may feel potentially isolating and lonely, it doesn’t have to: the most amazing and beautiful things can come into creation when people open themselves up to let their realities collide with those of the people around them.