Julie is a fascinating child

Julie is applying for acceptance to a week-long summer art program in Colorado. Only current high school juniors are eligible, and tuition is free if she gets accepted. She has to submit a portfolio on CD, which will be judged by a panel looking for real artistic ability. Once all the submissions from across the country are paired down based on demonstrated talent, the panel will then start looking at the candidates personal qualities gleaned from Teacher recommendations and the students own background information. Julie had to submit as part of her background info, a brief essay regarding her "most memorable moment in life". This seems like a difficult task for anybody to tackle - determining which most memorable moment to discuss, and deciding how honest and thorough could one afford to be in describing it. Thankfully, she has never had any huge traumatic experiences or earth shaking coming-of-age drama's, but as I said - Julie IS fascinating. With two days to go before the "postmark by" deadline, she discussed her dilemma with us - she couldn't think of a good "moment" that would intrigue and impress a panel of "Art" people. Then it came to her. This is - in her own words - her moment.
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History was always an interesting subject to me. As it requires a basic knowledge of important dates, I found ways to remember them early on. Events during the Renaissance in the 1500s were easy to remember, because the Renaissance was a vibrant renewal, and "1500s" is a rather intriguing shade of red. It's color stands out from the other centuries; preceded by the blue 1400s and succeeded by the green 1600s. The zeros, of course, just make the colors stand out more because they are white. One of the reasons I always try to get straight A's is because I like it's pale yellow color better than B's purple/blue. Words and dates just naturally have colors- not necessarily on the page, but in the mind. It's difficult to accurately describe, but it is almost as if as soon as I hear or read the word, its color simultaneously appears as well. I never thought much about it, or paid it much attention (unless I was using the colors to help me study) until last year.
One day, my mother asked, what seemed to me, an innocuous question, "What color is 'o'?" White, obviously, was my reply. "What about 's'?" S is green. General terms, of course, because several letters, and words themselves, are green, but different shades. Then mom said that "s" and "o" don't have colors, they're just letters. To which I said, of course they're letters. Letters are colored. I didn't really understand what mom was talking about, or why she had asked such obvious questions (she might well have asked what color the sky is). But she explained to me that in her psychology class, they had just finished discussing synesthesia- a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory leads to automatic and involuntary experiences in a second sensory. I have the most common form, grapheme, where letters and numbers are colored.
This was news to me. I had never heard of synesthesia before; I had just assumed that everyone thought this way, that it was as natural as breathing. It made me try to imagine thinking and reading without color, but honestly to this day I can't fathom it. I did, however, start to notice it more; when a certain word has a particularly interesting color, I realize immediately, not just if I need to notice in order to study. To me, the French verb "mettre" is a really deep purple, and its conjugated forms are slightly different- "mets" is purple/yellowish, "mettons" is more lavender. Synesthesia does help me remember people's name too. I have a really bad memory for names, so when I meet an acquaintance after not seeing them for some time, I find myself thinking, "Oh man, his name was colored like a creamsicle! It must have been Corey." I realize now, as well, that sometimes when I wanted to draw a picture, that I would think of the words that I wanted to describe it as, and use their colors as a basis for the picture's color scheme.
Learning that I have synesthesia was very memorable to me, because it changed the way I think about a variety of things. I never had a reason to think about my thoughts before, but I do a lot more now. I've always loved art, and now I have more ways to approach it, and more ideas and inspirations. At the very least, it's been entertaining to my friends, who want to know what color their names are.