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.
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