The Nonbinary Nature of Synesthesia
By: Grace Taylor Rae
Tags: Literature, Autism, Synesthesia, Art, Disability

I was eleven when I learned about synesthesia. A local news segment segued into a newly-discovered, rare neurological “disorder” that causes people to mix their senses, and it was the first time I considered that not everyone experienced the written wor(l)d the way I did. Not everyone’s 3s were cerulean, not everyone’s 7s were the color of the sun. That was news to me. Then I forgot the word. Syn — something? The internet was not the same back then.

I reunited with the term in a few years, around when I began enjoying online etymology dictionaries. This time I refused to let go. I invested pride and plenty of research into my newfound synesthetic identity. I joined Facebook groups, I took online tests, I told everyone I knew that Monday is magenta. I scoured each piece of literature I read for synesthetic characters and language. (Actually, I published my undergraduate thesis on William Faulkner leveraging synesthetic narrative multiplicity to question social constructions of language, logic, time, race and objectivity — more about that later / cw ableism if you read.)

In 2014 wrote a feature in my hometown newspaper detailing my experience as a synesthete:

“If I were riding down the road and saw a 45 mph speed limit sign, the grape cough-medicine color of the 4 and the burnt orange-yellow, waxy shade of the 5 stood out to me as clear as the clouds in the sky, or my reflection in the mirror. It wasn’t that the sign didn’t appear in black-on-white print, but rather that the sight of the digits projected their colored shadows onto the tablet in the back of my mind … Not until high school did I really begin to take a serious interest in synesthesia. Looking back, I think it’s because I was grasping at some definitive-yet-unclaimed sense of identity. Actually, I know I was. I started to take pride in being different, rather than fitting in. (And I began to learn and even embrace, little by little, that I would never, ever really fit in.)”

That last part is a perennial understatement that blooms fuller each season: Last year I learned that I am Autistic, after several years of independent investigation, several months of evaluation and a diagnosis at age 29.

While an estimated 20 percent of Autistic people are synesthetic, compared with 4 percent of the general population, integrating awareness of myself as an Autistic individual is the inverse of my initial learning of synesthesia: It is in fact an un-learning of the narrow definition I believed Autism to signal, and a re-education across the spectrum of identity and diversity in emergent human embodiment. Instead of realizing there is a name for what I experience, now I am witnessing that the name I thought meant one thing includes many stories, multiple narratives.

I am learning more about my specific sensory profile through my lived somatic experience than I am through a strictly conceptual or neuroscientific framework. Specifically, as a Survivor unwinding complex trauma, now I am living in my body as fully as I remember. For the first time ever, I am locating myself through the inside-out, rather than from the outside-at. This is one aspect of unmasking. Also, I am learning how my experiences intersect with the experiences of kin within the Autistic community, collectively. This joy is sacred.

Now that I am landing in my body, I am aware that beyond the binary of my one-to-one synesthetic pairings (such as 6 = forest green or H = cobalt blue) exists a layered sensory landscape. I paint songs’ textures when I listen, in the same way that I improvise dance more fluidly than I when I dissociated through the decades. (I had images of movement in mind, but experienced no connection in my body.)

For me, there is a difference between having synesthesia and being synesthetic. My perception is not property, but experience. Such is my Autistic identity, and why I use identity-first language. I do not “have” autism or synesthesia; I am Autistic and Synesthetic. Both are more nuanced than I ever imagined. The “tablet” in my mind is, more accurately, a multidimensional midnight-sky chalkboard-cosmos; I draw in all directions. Time is textured. I read concepts in the geometric and kinetic, I map the systemic through the linguistic. I am moving in deeper degrees of freedom.

Generally, Autistic people exist in specifics, in unique hyper- or hypo- sensitivities across the abundance of potential. There is no standard; there is shared code that is nonlocalized and decentralized. We recognize patterns in our sensitivity to the relation(all), energetic(all), repetition(all), fractal. Whether and how we express these sensitive perceptions is often if not always contingent on privilege, access and environment. That is another essay entirely.

Writing my narrative philosophy thesis, I was inspired by the urgency of discovering synesthesia as a new equation, as a modality of expression akin to language or code, and woven through the fabric of communication and meaning-making: Dance is movement through sound (time through space). Clothing is loud. Ideas are sharp. Onomatopoeia embodies truth because it is self-reflexive, recursive, autistic.

If I went back eight years ago, that urgency would be inspired by the clarity of intersections I am witnessing: Systemic harm is noisy and dense. Collective liberation exists beyond functioning labels, body classification, carcerality and disposability. Abundant harmony is healing trauma, disability justice, and eco-reparative design.

What would I leave unchanged?

“Ultimately, Faulkner employs sensory synesthesia … to draw the reader toward a larger philosophical examination of boundaries and structure, and the oppressive nature of the supposedly objective societal and temporal structures that we think define and explain humanity. Synesthesia becomes a device that Faulkner uses to delve directly into the inherently idiosyncratic nature of the human mind and its sensory experiences, ultimately breaking down logic and boundary not only in individual human thought, but also in the feeble human quest for standards and structure, and the ever-elusive position from which objective judgement is possible.”

Now I describe synesthesia (and autism) as itero-syncratic instead of idiosyncratic, emphasizing that again and again, we each are unique, as we emerge in our equations from the multiplicity of what is possible. The stewards of Autistic culture are Autistic. External gaze is an illusion. There is no monolith. There is no single narrative. There is no debate.