Taylor+Pestorius+2014

__Stop Asking Me To Read You__

I discovered the concept of synesthesia, not when I read A Mango Shaped Space, by Wendy Mass, I discovered it some earlier time. I think someone must have said, “hey Taylor, I have colors in my own two eyes, and I said something along the lines of wow that’s hella interesting and mildly cool. I was an exceptionally strange kid, so yeah, I probably thought stuff that all the other kids thought was weird was really cool. I thought colors were cool. I liked markers, I was too old for crayons, I could draw real good, colors were cool. Anyway, I don’t have synesthesia, and I’m not going to tell you that I do. Because that’s like when people say they’re ADHD, and they don’t have ADHD, and they can’t physically BE attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, it’s not like being Italian or something like that. That kind of thing bothers me because I do have ADHD and it sucks really bad and it makes the SATs hard. And people pretending to have it because they think it would make them quirky, not knowing it goes hand in hand with anxiety and depression, that puts me off. It’s obnoxious. But back to synesthesia. I think that is a very interesting disorder, and something I would like to study further. I read in that book I mentioned earlier that a lot of kids have it, and I thought I was one of them, but then I realized that I just see colors for people inside my head, like the shirts they’re wearing describes their personality in some way, sort of. And I knew this was called reading auras, which sounds really mystical and bullshit-esc. So I figured out this and remembered that I thought it to be normal as a wee girl because my best friend through elementary school could do this too, and like I said, I was a weird kid and consequently didn’t have a ton of close friends. I re-discovered this when I was fourteen and thought it made me top notch, because I was a freshman in high school and I sort of sucked. I still sort of suck, but I don’t freshman-suck. I really don’t know if any of this stuff is for real, this aura stuff, but it sort of feels real to me and makes a decent amount of sense. It helps me figure out things about people that I hadn’t really known before, and sometimes people will have had their auras read before, and I’ll get the same thing that their Buddhist aunt had read and then they’ll have some sort of deep respect for me, teen girl who reads brains. I get certain questions pretty often. I’ll share them and answer them now. “Are there good and bad colors?” No. That seems obvious to me. Because you’re not Satan or God and to me those are the only things that are 100% bad and 100% good. “How do you see them in your head?” Well, usually it’s the color shirt you’re wearing. But when I describe it to you, you’ll notice that it’s always a lengthy description of something found in nature. I don’t know, it just always is. It’s more than just a simple color. It often has value and texture. “Is there anyone you can’t read?” Yeah. Some people are just really hard to read. Some are really easy. I can’t read anyone I love, either. I can’t do my family and my close friends are really, really hard. “Do the colors mean something specific?” I mean, I think so. I just know what they mean for you. Maybe I should make myself a code.