Hidden Treasure Podcast: How My Neurological Condition Helped Me Cope
Starting at the impressionable age of 11, Miranda was taught to be believe she wasn't human. Here's how her synesthesia helped her cope through difficult times, and how she used her senses to befriend the world. Click on the arrow to listen and follow along with the transcript.
By Samantha Flaherty
SAM
MIRANDA
Upbeat music starts; outgoing phone call rings
I’m Miranda. By the way, I see more colors than you do.
Laughs I love it, I love it.
Music stops
Miranda Hughes is a young creative who sees more colors than most. She shares her life with an all-immersive neurological condition that distorts and enhances her senses.
Thumping sounds; cat meowing
My cat’s meowing just then just had a little, like, purple streak going through the room as she ran through and meowed. A lot of people might think, “Well, that’s invasive. That’s distracting.” And at times it is! But, to me, it’s the same as you’re looking around a room and seeing all the colors. It’s not disturbing. It’s just natural.
The condition is known as synesthesia, and it affects sensory perception. As a child, Miranda was an avid reader and writer, and she started noticing her sensory habits when she was in first grade while she was learning numbers and easy math. Each number had its own distinct color. It also happened a lot as she read, an activity she’s always been passionate about.
I remember words having a lot of color. I remember thinking on the stories and seeing the color of the words. To me, the world was just this beautiful, colorful thing. So, it didn’t feel abnormal. Because, I mean, as a child, you’re always absorbing information. So, I thought that it was just a part of the world.
While she reads, pigments of all kinds fly from the pages. Each letter has its own color, and when combined to make words, they make new colors! Sometimes the colors are blended, and sometimes they’re solid, but most times, they don’t end up retaining their independent colors. For Miranda, the letter ‘I’ is a white letter. But the word ‘individual’ is magenta, a kind of violet. They just show up once the word is made known to her. There’s no real meaning to these colors.
But living with synesthesia isn’t just about seeing the colorful beauty of the world. Sometimes it can be really overwhelming to deal with, especially out in public with all the advertisements, music, and screens. It adds this extra dimension to her daily life than can be hard to push through. I mean, this is why writing is so important to Miranda. It’s an expressive outlet. Her voice.
I did writing because it helped me tell stories, which is my favorite thing to do, and I kept doing that all the way through early high school. And then it was one of the things that my dad really came after.
Suspenseful music begins
So, I stopped writing. I stopped giving myself the ‘writer’ label. And just did not produce creative work. And it sucked, because it was just another form of stealing my voice through abuse.
For safety purposes, Miranda hasn’t been involved with her father for over 6 years. He was an ultimate manipulator.
My dad is a sociopath. The first few years of my life, it was mostly neglect. And when you’re born into that, you think it’s normal. So, my mom did a lot to try and compensate to make us feel very loved and such, but then she almost died. And when that happened, my dad really kind of turned the whole family against itself. More traumatic-based things were coming into play in my life.
When I was eleven, I was trained to believe I wasn’t human. I was a “defective creature that hurt people by existing,” which is how he got me to never talk about it with people. He taught me things like, if they came up and asked if something was wrong, I’d have to act like things are okay because otherwise I’m hurting them and I’m going to go to hell. Really intense stuff for an eleven-year-old to hear. There was a lot of “things would be better if you were dead.” He convinced me that we were a family in poverty, and that if I did things like go to a doctor or get socks, if I needed socks, I was going to ruin the family financially.
During this time, Miranda knew something was wrong, but she didn’t have the language for gaslighting and sociopathy as a little kid.
With sociopaths, people are not people. They’re toys. They’re things to play with. And his game was to see how long he could kind of keep us under his control.
Suspenseful music stops
Miranda tried many things, like seeing the school therapist once she got into college, and started studying social work. But her father caught wind and shut it down, ruining her school finances, and forcing her to sign extreme student loans. Soon after pulling out for a semester to recover from a near-death experience, Miranda realized she wasn’t doing what she loved. Eventually, she switched out of social work, and out of art history, and into a subject she’s adored since childhood.
One of my electives was creative writing. I was like, “if nothing else, it’s an easy A.” And I fell back in love with it all over again, and I was like, this is something I love doing.
Upbeat music starts
You sit back and you’re like, “Am I doing what I love? Because as soon as I die, I don’t get that chance to do it again. And why should I wait ‘till old age to do it?” Some people don’t make it to old age. I almost didn’t!
At this point in time, Miranda had reentered the writing world, her synesthesia, fully acknowledged.
Some people would get paint colors from things in the past like minerals, or plants, and in some ways with my synesthesia I feel like it’s the same thing. We have a rabbit that lives outside that’s inspired writing scenes and just moments and color codes that I later touch on. So, I feel liberated and therefore I feel creative. Being creative means not having tons of confines, but I have enough structure that I can’t go too far and totally miss the mark.
Despite the box she was forced into as a child, and placed in as a creative, Miranda persevered.
Synesthesia helped a lot. Not early on, mostly ‘cause I wasn’t aware of it, and I had to suppress who I was; I wasn’t allowed to show big emotion. My creative writing got mocked or ripped up or whatever, and I wasn’t supposed to have this voice.
So, suddenly, I’m free from all of this. I had something that was helping me process information, my synesthesia, and now I had something that helped me convey, my writing. I suddenly had a means of language that I never had before. It’s like releasing an animal that’s lived in a zoo back into the wild; even if they’re free, they’re not equipped to handle that.
And at the same time as all of this, I was really learning that I am human. I was coming out of that brainwashing. I was acknowledging, “Wow, I’ve been human this whole time. What the heck does that mean? How does one express emotion appropriately? How does one experience the world and tell it to other people? How do you get along with people who’ve known that they’re people?” It was this fascinating amalgamation of three things that I’ve had this whole time but just got to experience for the first time, all at once.
My synesthesia helps me communicate with people in ways I otherwise struggle with, especially because of the stuff I went through trauma-wise. It’s helped me connect to people and learn what it means to be human. If anything, it’s really helped me, I think, with empathy. When I worked in social work, for example, and someone was getting really worked up, and if I could kind of match what their calm voice was, then they’d seem a bit more willing to come back to it.
I had a tendency, because I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, to spiral into flashbacks, or big emotions, or I’d default back to the way my dad had taught me to think. And I had to, not only unlearn it, but relearn good things. And synesthesia helped me with that because suddenly I had language again. I was getting my writing voice back.
When I had moments where I was spiraling out of control, one of the things that happened to me is that my words kind of beat me up. And I noticed every time I started to spiral, if I hit certain words, because I had a tendency to repeat certain things, especially when I had a crusted over amount of anxiety, that I would just lose control.
So, I started to go, “Okay, when you see this color of word, when the color hits you, before you can go, just stop.” And so, my synesthesia helped me, first, take back control of my language to myself, which was a very big deal because I had only had these awful words in my head for years, and suddenly I’m clearing them out and I’m making them my own again.
There’s this great song by the band, Arion, and they have a line that I absolutely love that’s, “I rule the ruins of what we have.” And that was kind of a big thing between my dad and me, because my dad had my brain for so many years, but it was mine again. And even if it was broken, these are my ruins. I get to choose what happens to them.
There’s something to be said about seeing people and realizing there’s so much more to them. I like being able to go in and be like, “I have synesthesia,” and then suddenly a different side of people comes out, this curiosity, this human sense. I think we’re all born with wonder and curiosity that we kind of stamp out as we get older. And I love just bringing it back out. I get to be that person.
Upbeat music starts
Upbeat music continues for a bit, then ends