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"Tuesday's pink," I said. I and a friend of mine were sitting in my teacher's car and on our way to camp. I'd come up with the idea to attach colours to the different days of the week. Monday, for instance, was white, because the moon is white. We couldn't think of any colour to attach to Tuesday - it was nothing more than the day the school library was open, but we didn't know what colour books had. Later I thought of the colours we'd attached to the days and I came to the conclusion that indeed Friday was blue (as we'd decided), but I'd no idea why it should be. And certainly Monday wasn't white - it was green, and Wednesday, which we'd determined to be green, was some type of orangey pink. I was about seven or eight years old at the time and it seems like my first memory that's anything to do with what I later discovered was synaesthesia.
I didn't realize my perceptions of coloured graphemes, textures and time units and my association of sound with colour weren't "normal" till a few years ago. Then I started looking at my braille display and trying to convince myself that the characters I read weren't coloured at all. It sometimes would annoy me that I saw colours while reading or touching something - or I confused my synaesthetic colours with the real colours (I'd be convinced something was one colour, while it appeared to be a totally different when I looked at it).
The first time I heard the word "synaesthesia" was during my Dutch class while discussing metaphors. However, I didn't give it a second thought - just another difficult linguistic term. I didn't realize synaesthesia was not just a linguistic term, but that there were people actually experiencing it - and that I was one of them. The first time I read about synaesthesia being an actual condition, was somewhere in October, 2002 in the article The Letter Purple, which was a diary entry by a person I ofted read entries of. Then I first knew that not everyone had these perceptions, but I wasn't the only one either.
I consider myself to be only a little bit synaesthetic: I have projected chromagraphemic synaesthesia (meaning I see colours projected on the letters I read), projected texture-colour synaesthesia, time-colour synaesthesia and associated sound-sight synaesthesia (meaning I get a sense of colour/sight when hearing a particular sound but don't actually see it). Recently someone asked me what I considered really synaesthetic, the fact being that only 10% of grapheme-colour synaesthetes are projectors and I also was an associated sound-sight synaesthete. The reason I said (and still say) I'm only a little bit synaesthetic, is that I for example don't see sounds (many synaestethes actually see voices, sounds etc.) and my f main synaesthesia is the chromagraphemia, which I consider a "minor" type of synaesthesia. I don't know what it's like to see sounds, taste shapes or smell colours and it's hard to imagine. But yeah, maybe an associated letter-colour synaesthete may think I'm very synaesthetic and a non-synaesthete might consider me just weird.
For clarity's sake: I don't consider synaesthesia to be a disorder in any way and I'm very happy of my synaesthetic perceptions. If I'll become totally blind one day, I hope the colours will stay with me through synaesthetic experiences - but I've read about a person going blind at age 12 but never losing his synaesthesia, so I've great hope about that. I don't write my synaesthesia page to draw attention to yet another thing I'm abnormal in and I DON'T want to be seen as poor or whatever because I'm so "weird". Synaesthesia is just a part of me, just like the colour of my hair - but I've no idea of how to make a webpage on my hair colour. Maybe I'll do it someday though *LOL*.