What Color is Wednesday to You?

I have always loved calendars.

When I was a child, I couldn’t wait to get to sixth grade. I knew that every month, the teacher, Mrs. Pollack, would assign homework to draw a calendar that combined math problems with art. So every month, I would get to draw a calendar and decorate it with colors and pictures to match the month.

For some, this meant themed calendars around the holidays, such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day. And sure, I made those kinds of calendars. But in my mind, there was also an extra element I needed to consider. The months and days had to be just the right color, or it just wouldn’t feel right.

Some days feel better than others

For example, I love Wednesdays and Saturdays. Those days have the best colors of the week.

Wednesday is sunny yellow, brighter and lighter than all the other days. Saturday is a shade of green that fills me with energy and makes me want to be outdoors.

If all this sounds strange to you, that’s understandable. What I’m describing is a form of synesthesia, which is a cross-wiring of the senses that affects nearly 4% of all people, and causes some people to experience overlaps in vision, sound, feelings and tastes.

With this type of Synesthesia, perceptions of time are tinged with color. Some people associate days of the week, and months of the year, as specific colors. This is a form of time unit visualization, and according to Sean Day’s chart on the 73 kinds of Synesthesia, it affects about 22% of synesthetes.

Here’s how the days of the week look to me:

I’ve always loved Wednesdays and Saturdays. They’re the brightest days of the week.

Looking at months, my March has always been bright green, and my September has always felt dark blue. When I think of a specific month, it’s as if there’s a colored cloud hovering over it, defining that time frame as pink, or orange, or blue.

What do you mean, Wednesday is yellow?

Many people have never heard of synesthesia, even people who have experienced it all their lives. For many synesthetes, until someone introduces them to the name of it, they may not even realize it’s a thing.

Twenty years ago, I discovered that I had another form of synesthesia, called grapheme-color synesthesia, which causes me to “see” letters and numbers in my head as having specific colors. (This happens the most for me with names, and if you’re curious, you can see the color of your name based on my specific synesthesia colors.)

I went for years thinking that everyone just knows that the letter A is red, and N is bright green, and that the number four is magenta.

Similarly, I assumed that everyone just knows that June is bright blue, and Mondays are fiery orange-red.

Discovering the types of Synesthesia

In my case, I was lucky to find David Eagleman’s Synesthesia Battery Test in 2006. The site (which shut down in late 2020) gave visitors a quiz to determine what kinds of synesthesia they might have. Before I took the test, I had no idea that my perception of colored days and months was unusual. The test results let me know that I actually have several kinds of synesthesia.

From my test results at Synesthete.org

The test had me repeatedly identify the colors I associated with different days, letters, numbers and months, and then gave me a visualization of my answers and a score based on the consistency of my answers and the time it took me to respond. Here’s an example of my results for the Weekday Color Picker Test:

This is a screengrab from 2006, showing the results of the Synesthesia Battery test, concluding that I have a form of synesthesia that associates days of the week with colors.

Is Wednesday a color to you?

Now that the Synesthesia Battery Test is no longer available, it’s become a little harder to determine whether you have specific types of synesthesia, but it’s not impossible.

I’d suggest you start by asking yourself some simple questions:

• Days of the week: What color is Monday? What color is Saturday?
• Months of the year: What color is October? What color is March?
• Letters of the alphabet: What color is B? What color is A? What color is E?
• Numbers: What color is 1? What color is 5?

Write down your answers, if you have them. (This part is key. If you can’t immediately answer them, that’s a sign you may not have synesthesia.)

Put your answers away for at least a few days and don’t reference them.

Then answer these questions again and compare your results. Your colors should match without feeling like you have to “remember” them. If you are truly synesthetic, your associations should be involuntary and consistent. You should not feel like you are choosing the colors.

For example, I’m not a huge fan of the color purple. I wouldn’t choose it for a letter, but that doesn’t matter. To me, J is purple. I can’t help it. It just is.

Similarly, months of the year and days of the week should just “be” a color, whether you like that color or not.

Document and share your answers here …

If you do have answers to the questions above, consider writing your answers as a comment on this story. Every synesthete is unique, and I’d love for others to see how differently these perceptions are from person to person.

So Medium readers, what color is your Wednesday?