I’ve always been good at math, probably because i count in colors. I didn’t realize this was out of the ordinary until i was in high school. Before then, i thought everyone agreed that 1 is red and 5 is blue. These were just facts to me. I didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary for my whole life leading up to high school.
    Synesthesia is a psychological phenomenon that causes people to associate, for example, numbers with colors. Each number has an assigned, specific color that people like me see when dealing with that number.
    I first discovered the name of my “phenomenon” in a psychology class during freshman year. While he was describing the phenomenon, i kept expecting him to clarify how we all see numbers in colors and the discovered phenomenon was different from that, but no - i was the only one in the class who experienced it. I felt out of place; like I was visibly standing out. I wasn’t sure how to grasp that it wasn’t globally known that each number was also a color.
    I’ve always struggled with mixing up numbers in both high school and middle school. Because 2 and 4 share a similar color, i would switch them when doing basic math. This careless mistake would cause my math tests and quizzes to be marked down no matter how well i performed otherwise. Telling time and remembering numbers was also difficult.There have been times where I'm an hour late to work because I mixed up the numbers by accident. It made me feel dumb, and thus I began to give up on math. In my final year of middle school, I almost flunked math entirely. I didn’t try and felt helpless in class.
    When I found out that it wasn’t normal to see numbers as colors, I finally had a reason for my struggles. I improved my grades because now I knew I wasn’t just dumb, and I no longer felt hopeless. I even enjoyed math for the first half of my high school career.  However, I still didn’t have a way to harness it. Just because I knew why I was having problems didn't mean I knew how to deal with it. While I still messed up on basic math, my grades were okay. It just felt like a disadvantage that i could only do my best to ignore at that point.
    Algebra 2 was when I began to realize that I couldn’t ignore it. The jump from basic geometry to algebra 2 was hard. I felt useless again and started giving up on my grades. At the end of the year, I decided that I needed to change something. I didn’t want to suffer from this. I wanted to overcome it, and do my best to show that i am capable of doing well.
    This year, my senior year, i began to understand how my head worked. I started looking at the colors that appeared when I tried to remember numbers. I no longer see mistakes with simple adding and subtracting on tests. Instead of impeding me, they help me. If I see a number associated with something I need to remember, I just recite the colors. Because of this advantage I’ve created for myself, I can now work with numbers not only at a normal pace but at a higher pace.
    Since I've started to commit to overcoming my difficulties, I’ve found I’m more confident in my math courses. I no longer struggle with basic mistakes as frequently, and i’ve even found myself using colors to better utilize my memory. Being able to solve an issue i’ve had to deal with for almost my whole life has let me realize i am capable of more than i realize. I know how to deal with issues that come up in life, even if they feel impossible, because i’ve overcome something i didn’t even know existed until three years ago. Without this strange ability, i wouldn’t feel as accomplished as i do now.