By Vicki Tapia

I gravitate toward an orderly life. Perhaps it was instilled in me by my mother as a small child. Repeat after me: A place for all things and all things in their place.

Numbers have always been the constant in my life through which I can find a wee bit of harmony in a disorderly universe. I am often unconsciously lining up numbers; adding, subtracting or multiplying them. I believe that five minus four equals one. People have been known to say to me, “You should have been a bean-counter.”

I find numbers to be calming. They ground me. If she were this age, what age was he? How many books did I sell in January compared to December? How much have I paid for advertising this month compared to last? How old was my mother when her first grandchild was born in 1960? Numbers sometimes roll around in my head like balls on the billiards table.

Trivial numbers reside in the recesses of my brain, such as the phone number for our auto insurance representative. I have no idea why I randomly remember particular phone numbers, but it does eliminate the need to look them up on my iPhone, plus I’ve read it’s a healthy way to stimulate memory.

Numbers somehow help bring a sense of order into my daily life. My husband affectionately calls me “The Count” from Sesame Street. Have you ever felt numbers help you to create a sense of order in our madcap society of fake news, insatiable social media and conflict?

While I’ve always felt I don’t quite “fit in,” a couple of years ago I learned I actually do share an oddity with about one percent of the world’s population. I am a synesthete, meaning I experience grapheme-color synesthesia. Huh? What is that? Is it contagious? Is it dangerous?

Well, no, it is neither. Grapheme-color synesthesia means my perception of letters and numerals is associated with color. Yes, that’s correct. Whenever I think of a letter, word or number, it has a color or hue in my mind. This perception has been with me as far back as I can remember, is involuntary and completely consistent over time. Experts say it is not related to mental illness (whew) and it is possible that people who experience it can perform better on certain tests involving memory. I do, in fact, remember being able to memorize easily during my school years. First described in the 19th century, evidence for this perceptual phenomenon points to an “excess interconnectivity in the visual cortex of the brain.”

Over my lifetime, the colors or hues of individual letters and words have always remained the same. Some of the colors are of a hue that I can’t describe with language. For nearly all of my life, I never mentioned this quirk to anyone, because on some level I thought everyone saw words and numbers in color and simply took it for granted as “normal.” One day, an article describing grapheme synesthesia caught my eye and I suddenly had words to describe my idiosyncrasy. Scientists have now confirmed there is a strong genetic compenent, which holds true in our family. One day, I asked each of my three children what color the letter “B” is and my youngest said “yellow.” The other two looked at us like we were missing a few cogs.

Curious about the “color” of your name? Letters and numbers are different colors for different people. My blue “A” may be green for another synesthete. I see the letter “V” and also my name “Vicki” as a blue-violet color and my last name “Tapia” as a shade of brown.

Any other synesthetes out there?