By: Morgan Topol

When I was younger, it felt like everyone else was born with a filled-out rulebook I never got.

Sure, I was able to make friends. It wasn’t impossible by any means. I was never severely bullied, even in elementary school. In many ways, I moved through the world like anyone else.

But there were things that separated me from other kids. My inability to clean school lunch tables without gagging. The unexplainable colors in my mind’s eye that would brighten and dim like the flickering of a lamp. How painful it felt to make eye contact. The pitches I’d hear in everyday sounds after learning how to read music. Phrases in natural threes, compulsively repeated in my mind out of fear something bad would happen to me if I didn’t. A sound sensitivity so intense that I’d jump in my chair upon hearing a pencil hit the ground.

When I was a child, I never had an explanation for any of this, and I certainly didn’t feel comfortable sharing these things with anyone, including my parents. All I knew for sure was that I was different. I thought these things made me defective, and therefore had to be kept secret. In believing I was a mistake, I developed a strategy:

Suppress, Suppress, Suppress.

As I tailored and masked aspects of myself to fit the expectations of my friends, family and society at large, I’d eventually realize there was a positive: I was still able to find individuality in the versions of myself I found acceptable to show the world, creating my own identity and performing it in spite of the parameters convention’s rulebook had laid out before me.

I began to see the empty rulebook I’d carried from birth as a blessing: it left space for me to write rules of my own.

It was this silver lining that helped me realize my potential as a performer. I’d grow up to participate in an array of performance-based activities, finding inner confidence, an understanding of people and the value of rhetorical power through it all.

I’d also uncover some enduring hidden truths as to why I thought there was something “wrong with me” over a span of many, many years: ADHD and coexisting processing disorders, OCD passed down to me through genetics, and both perfect pitch and synesthesia (my types of the latter being chromesthesia and grapheme-color synesthesia), which are cognitive traits found commonly in musical savants.

Back in high school, upon finding out about my perfect pitch (the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note/pitch without a reference tone), many musicians young and old would ask me if it was “a blessing and a curse” like they’d heard it to be. In other words, they wanted to know if perfect pitch was worth having, even if it meant having to knowingly endure out-of-tune sounds on a daily basis, comparable to nails on a chalkboard in my case.

This is a question that easily extends to all the things I’ve mentioned. Of course there are “curses” that come with being this way, I’d never deny that. But is it a blessing for me to have a natural knack for performing, a perfectionistic streak that often doesn’t let me turn in work if I don’t think it’s good enough, and the ability to perceive and experience music in ways that are shared by very few others? I’d think so.

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I hope you enjoyed my first blog and got to know a little more about me in the process! This blog was written on assignment for UNC Professor Gary Kayye’s “Branding of Me” course.

I’ll be writing and posting two blogs a week for the duration of the semester, primarily sticking to Sundays and Thursdays as my posting days.