Synnies, respect your friends!

Well, I made this on a prompting from another post I'd gotten on my dash about Synnies and how some have taken to treating their non-Synnie friends. Apparently some have been calling them 'Nonnies' which... is actually a plural for the word 'Nonny.' Never to refer to your friends like that. Seriously, if anyone has ever read or seen 'Much Ado about Nothing', they'd know it is a word means "Fool" or is used as a derogatory term for female genitalia. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to denigrate someone for NOT having a brain that's been altered by nature. Who can help how they're born? It'd be like calling them stupid for being born a certain race, it's very rude.

So, I made this picture. It's a picture of me and one of my non-Synnie friends just listening to music. She can see the reality of things and though different it's beautiful. (Seriously, if you ever look at a city in the rain its a tangle of lights and fog, which is fantastic.) I share music with her, we share laughs and we share friendship. Just because she doesn't know my experience doesn't make hers any less important or valid and I value her for the person she is rather than just being a sum of her parts. We decide how we treat the people around us and we Synnies need to remember that we're the ones with a different brain structure. We don't like being thought of as broken or incomplete (although I confess I sometimes see myself that way) so why should we be so thoughtless as to invoke snobbery on people who don't see things the way we do? That's a terrible behavior and I hope I stop seeing it. Treat your friends with respect, so what if they don't understand this part of you, it doesn't make them cherish you any less.

(If it did, they're not a friend and so they can go jump in a lake.) Alright, rant over.

Silence is golden? (Except when it's not)

Now, I’ll just come out and say it. No, I haven’t told my family I have Synesthesia. In fact, I haven’t told anyone I know save a hand full of people who, I’ll be honest, are the only people I actually trust with this information IRL and only a couple of them are related to me. (Being online and connecting with other Synnie’s is awesome and since I don’t do social media my family is blissfully unaware.) I haven’t neglected to tell my family because they’d do something horrible…well…actually I don’t know what they’d do. My family is a pretty mixed bag when it comes to stuff like this. 

When I was in college some of my family thought I was gay because I wasn’t having relations. They didn’t know that I was an asexual and just never possessed those feelings. When I clarified that point…I got a lot of rather surprising scrutiny. One of my sisters was so affronted by the idea that I was uninterested she proceeded to gossip about me as though I were some aberration to be corrected to other family members.

So, with that little event having happened and having received some grief for being outside the norm…I really don’t have an interest in telling my family about my condition. The last thing I need is for them to look at me and think, “There’s the broken thing we’re all related to. I’m still not convinced you’re not making it up! You could be crazy, let’s have you committed” because if I’m honest…that’s likely how it would go.

It’s not as though I don’t feel shame at my circumstance either. Lots of people see it as a super power or some awesome extra that they can happily share. I am glad for those people because they are unique and interesting. Unfortunately for me…I can’t take such comfort. There’s always a price to natures changes and I’ve unwillingly paid mine. I couldn’t live without my Syn but…it’s taken something from me that affected me negatively my entire life. Because of my condition, I can retain linguistically based knowledge like nobody’s business. Downside, it screws with my mathematics big time. I’ve mentioned this before but I’ll say it again. My numbers melt while I’m trying to work and even after I’ve successfully completed a problem it literally bleeds out of my periphery. Sure, I can memorize long strings of numbers but I can’t divide fractions worth a damn. I’ve pushed myself to learn math, all of my life I have tried to force it to work in every which way I can imagine and I just can’t make it click. If I ever got a right answer to a math question it was on accident even after constant repetition. 

Finding out about my condition answered a lot of my questions. Unfortunately it also marked me then and there. I was broken and there’s no fix for me, no magic method to turn me into a math genius. I truly am an aberration and I’ll never know what the world really looks like or if there’s a real to be had. My version of life is so alien and different from those I live around and worse, I’m the only Synnie I’ve ever met in person.

 I know a lot of people would say “hey man, what is normal anyway?” and they’re right. But when you’re alone and no one around you knows how you feel and you can’t express it to them for fear they might be critical of you when they’re just supposed to be your family, it’s frustrating. There’s a lot of uncertainty, I want to tell some of them but what if they tell someone I don’t want to know by accident? What if they think I’m making it up and treat me poorly or act snide towards me? I don’t want the burden of those feelings so I choose not to say. Sadly it leaves me alone in this. It’s rather frustrating to feel like you’re a thing and not a person.

So, having gone through the experience of being scrutinized for asexuality I didn’t choose, I shudder to think how they’d react when the find out the core of my humanity, my brain, is different. I watch their voices in my head when they talk, I feel their voices in my chest, throat, my scapula…really I’m just some kind of human shaped sound sink. Some days I don’t feel human because of the distance between me and the people I love. That has been difficult for me but, I still couldn’t live without my Syn. I just have to work on why I feel the way I do and once I get myself sorted I’ll be all human again.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t spend all day every day lamenting my existence and screaming into the clouds or something, I just spend a lot of time worrying that I could lose the respect or care that I have from people I love over something I can’t help. I know a lot of people would say ‘screw them’ but, I care for my family and I don’t want to throw them away or lose them somehow…it’s all just very complicated and I’ll figure it out eventually. Right now though, those are my reasons for why I haven’t said anything.  

Sensory Overload again?

I wear a lot of sound.  I know I’ve mentioned it in jest and in honesty but, I guess I haven’t been too clear about some of the difficulties living with Synesthesia can create. Now, not every Synnie suffers from Sensory Overload, (which is awesome) but for those that do their Syn can be a burden during these times. Now, I’ll clarify what I mean by wearing sound. I’ve mentioned that at parties and big noisy occasions that I’ve been bombarded with sound and it wears me out. During a fit of Sensory Overload, however, there’s more to it. I have been in situations where I’ve spent the majority of my time in an overload and I didn’t even know it.

Example, I’ve mentioned I used to work on the phones and that it had a deleterious effect on my health.

Well, I would absorb so much sound and color in my periphery during the day that by the end I felt as though there were seams in my skin ready to split if I so much as bent too far in one direction. My head was filled with the jumble of noise from the day and sometimes it would be hard to clear all the noise out of my mind’s eye, as if I were some kind of noise retainer and it just lingered there constantly. People’s voices would ring in my head long after I was done dealing with them and I just wanted to shut their voices out.

It was excruciatingly painful and I would usually be in panic mode by the time my shift was over. Once I got home and could stick my head into a pair of comfortable headphones and listen to Dvorak I was good. I could sit in stillness and listen to music that was calming and I could literally feel the throbbing heat in my back begin to ebb as the cold press of the music would issue them away. My periphery would fill with the colors of the music and the aches in my skull would subside. Often I’d just lay flat on the floor and let it seep out of me.

Pretty much, after a shift I’d ache all over, my head would be killing me, I’d have heart palpitations and my eyes and teeth would ache together. Getting to my safe zone is what helped me work the day out of my system. I did this every day for three plus years and it was getting harder and harder to take comfort. The agony began to compile and soon I was in a bad place all around. When I got laid off I spent two weeks just getting the ick out of my skin and muscle tissue, like cleaning a grease trap that’s been ignored for far too long (pleasant image am I right?). My health improved remarkably when I was no longer overloaded almost 24/7. This stuff can be serious so, I have found ways to cope with my little panics in private. I haven’t told my family about the condition so…hence the ‘deal with it yourself’ situation but…I’ll detail that in another post, it’s sure to be a long one.