Saying “Left” or “Right” is an easy task for someone to tell which direction they should take turn to. We’re all know that it’s much simpler to say, and it must be easy to determine which one are right, and which one are left. But unfortunately, I often stutter just to make sure which are which. Stupid, right? Well… it’s hard to tell the reason. I mean, I knew the reason already, but it’s feel like it doesn’t makes any sense to say aloud. But… meh, forget it, let me explain.
Childhood Era
The story starts from…. my senior high era. On a bright day, i remembered one of my childhood memories, my kindergarten days. I remembered one of the days where the teacher says “This is the left hand” and etcs. At that time, they teach us basic directions and addressing things, in which i failed to tell my full address to the teacher. “N**** (my childhood name), where do you live??”, in which i replied “PT. (redacted).” A name of my dad’s workplace. lol.
So they began like, showing that this is the right hand, it used for blablabala and continue explaining the other side. Me, being smart-ass kid, knows that if teacher does something, we have to mirror it. That’s how the disaster started. The teacher DO correct me, but me being stubborn, don’t even remember it. Lol. So there’s the starting point of how i get confused.
My school’s speaking Indonesian obviously, so i speak “Kiri-Kanan”. Kiri=Left, Kanan=Right.
But also, i get some English Course, thanks to my parents, so the teacher teach me “Left-Right”, so i can use “Left and Right” too. This one, is a bit different. Since it’s kind of private course, so the teacher do told me with the correct way. She stand behind me, and she raised my hand and telling “Ok, so this is the left one”, she continues to lower my left hand, and raise the other, “this is the right one.”
YASS this is the best way to remember it. But wait, if you finally the correct one, why you still stutter when people speak “Left-Right”? The answer is… the color of the word.
Words Have Colors?
Uhh…..yes. Sort of. In this case, this is the the major reason of my confusion. I sense the word emits specific color. For example Kanan (=Right), have the same color as Left. It has some kind of royal blue color.
And also, Kiri (means Left) have the similar color with Right, Yellow-Amber.
At this point, this really confuse me. Not only it match the opposite meaning of the word, my imagination of my body’s left and right side are now get colorized too. My left side, are blue and my right side are yellow. This makes me much more aware when you use “Left-Right” instead of “Kanan-Kiri”.
*explode*
At this point, my senior-high brain got mindblowed with the fact that it’s not only me that experience this. (Oh, i meant the “word to color” thing…) After several research and finding some websites. I finally know that people like this are often called as grapheme color synesthesia. (To be honest, i’m not sure either whether I’m synesthetic or not.)
Conclusions
I’m weird, in a weird way.
Jk. So, when it comes to tell people which way to go, i’ll try my best to guess which are left and which are right.
Do the words-to-color thing doing any good for me? Erm…. meh, i don’t feel like it help much, but yup, it does help me a bit.
See you.
