Séamas O'Reilly: My 'year shape' has corners — but I learned I'm just as weird as everyone else
Séamas O'Reilly: "fascinating glances into the inner workings of a thousand strangers". Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
As September approaches, I’m once again reminded of a weird facet of my brain — my year has corners.
August to September is not, in my mind, a straight line, but the rounding of a 90-degree angle that brings me to an entirely new phase of the year. Another juncture occurs from December to January, and one so pronounced that the month between, say, December 15th and January 15th, feels intrinsically different to the month between January 15th and February 15th. July and August are on their own plane, which takes us to the approaching event horizon of September and the hard corner I can see in front of me as we speak.
Perhaps you have no idea what I’m talking about, or possess a similar sense but with some other variation. If so, even a cursory glance at the above examples should suggest why such a feeling could develop. My brain first began the process of placing structure on time in school, when my year was bisected by September starts, Christmas/New Year break, and summer holidays. All of which might explain the “sense” of this arrangement, but not necessarily the fact that I literally, physically visualise the year in this pattern in my head. Nor that I have not been unable to shake it in the 18 years since I left the strict timings of schooling, or that many people never developed anything like this sense at all.
It’s hard to explain, and many years of saying this to people has resulted in a lot of squinting eyes and tilted heads as people tried to understand what I mean, before kindly changing the subject. Only a few times has someone yelped “YES!”, seized my hand and drawn their own “year shape” so we could compare. But for the most part I don’t mention it because I don’t “think” about it at all, any more than I analyse my sense that low notes are “fat” and high notes “skinny”, or my concrete presumption that all spooky skeletons are male.
And then, last week, I drew a version of my year and posted it online, in the hopes that someone, somewhere could tell me I wasn’t insane. Early responses were not promising. “Fully insane” and “are you on drugs” were two of the first replies, while “what” and “no” came close behind, and in many, many forms.
Within minutes, though, I had dozens of responses from people telling me they too had a formatted year in a roughly equivalent shape, only with this or that variation. After an hour, this had become hundreds, and my mentions were now full of people describing — with great relish — flamboyantly complex alternatives, and furnishing me with drawings, outlines, and diagrams of their “year shapes”; ovals, doughnuts, rhomboids, tessellating rectangles and shifting three-dimensional planes.
It was thrilling to read. Mostly, because these were fascinating glances into the inner workings of a thousand strangers, but also because it allowed me the vindication of watching as all those who thought I was insane, having to slowly come to terms with the fact that they live surrounded by hundreds of similarly unhinged people.
Occasionally, this feeling of vindication was mingled with a vague unease at my own hypocrisy. For as much as I balked at the people calling my weird year shape weird, it didn’t take long for me to feel the same way about other people’s variants. What became clear was that Time-Space Synaesthesia — for this, I was told many times, is the name given to this phenomenon — presents in fascinatingly complex and varied forms.
There were mental calendars itemised by colour, shape even texture. Months of burnt orange or sparkling crimson. Helix-patterns of absurd intricacy, bisecting units of time so specific it would take a living room wall to plot out every point. Some went counter-clockwise, or crisscrossed back and forth through space-time. Soon the “year” itself was joined by diagrammatic representations of weeks and even lifetimes, with lines, arrows, and intricate colour coding depicting decades and even — with a degree of scope that would seem impractical for a human being — centuries.
Suddenly, my own crude baseball-field-shaped year — which, hours earlier, had sounded so crazy several people suggested I should be placed in protected housing — seemed woefully pedestrian. I was the synasthesiast equivalent of a guy whose LinkedIn profile says he likes long walks on the beach and hanging out with friends.
Mostly though, it felt like pressing my nose to the window of a greater, more impressive mania, that might make my own seem insignificant, but also made me more fascinated than ever about the weird commonality one takes in being just as weird as everyone else.
Having dipped my toe, I want to learn more. Perhaps there’s a course, or a workshop I can take to get to the bottom of our wonky brains. Such classes probably begin in September. Sure, that’s just around the corner.
