Alexis Kirkland: I never had to choose my subject- my subject rather chose me

Fears: caterp*llars, the way raw cotton looks, the way mushrooms look, if 1D ever breaks up

Annoyances: slurping, people trying to get food from between their teeth, people not letting me finish my sentences before making assumptions

Accomplishments: Existing today, telling someone about my past, moving out of a harmful household.

Confusions: Why do I have to think they way that I do, why do I take longer to learn things than everyone else, why am I such a crybaby, why didn't I spend more time with my younger sister when I had the chance

Sorrows: my weight, height, teeth, missing my younger sister, when people tell me that I'm not "natural" or "normal" or that who I am isn't okay to be.

Dreams: Seeing my younger sister again, meeting 1D, being a role model for a large group of people

Idiosyncrasies: synesthesia, my dedication to 1D, the way I want to present myself changes from day to day, if I say "I love you" to someone I don't actually love, I have to sort of blow the air out of my mouth afterward because I don't want any remnants of that false "I love you" in my mouth (extremely strange???)

Risks: talking back to adults, opening up to people

Beloved Possessions, Now and Then: Then, my old chihuahua, Ariel, and my Nintendo DS's (I had 3). Now, my phone, tablet, iPod, old tickets to 1D concerts, photos and videos from 1D concerts I have been to

Problems: controlling my anxiety (because right now it seems to control me), extreme procrastination, caring what other people think

Something that I'd like to discuss is my synesthesia. I've had this for as long as I can remember. Synesthesia is when your 5 senses overlap. For some people, it can be extreme, to where they see an object and it makes them hear a certain sound or smell a certain smell. For others, like me, it can be to a milder extent. For example, imagine that when you think of the letter B, not only do you associate it with the color blue, but its gender is male, it's the father of C and D, is married to A, and has a naive personality. Well, this is what my brain is like 24/7. My numbers and letters and days of the week and months and years all exist in a certain spatial pattern, and almost all of them have colors and relations to the others in their category, and all of then have gender expressions and personalities. Allow me to elaborate on one of these topics (it would take way too long to discuss all of them):

Numbers:

0- colorless; male; the supposed leader of the other numbers

1- white; gender-fluid; a better leader of the other numbers but whose powers are limited because it is so far up in the sequence of numbers

2- colorless or brown; male; a father figure to 3 and 4

3- yellow; female; a younger, naive, giggly sister to 4

4- blue; male; the older brother to 3, sort of a jock, kind of dumb

5- orange; male; dumber than his best friend, 4

6- green; usually male but sometimes seen as female; scared of everything, confides in 5 and asks him for help when 7 isn't looking, but of course, 5 is too dumb to know what's going on with 6.

7- red; female; takes advantage of 6, picks on 6, doesn't care about 6's feelings. She is the one who makes 6 anxious and scared all the time. 

8- purple; male; extremely depressed with suicidal tendencies. Hates his life, wishes he was never born. Emotionally and verbally abused by 9.

9- black; male; ruthless, filled with hatred, pushes 8 to the edge, finds it amusing to trigger 8. He is the one who made 8 become a shell of himself. He's worse than 7.

10- black and white; male; completely oblivious to the magnitude of anything 9 does, sort of bothersome to 11.

And this goes on and on, for all of the numbers, 0-99, and then it starts over at 100. They are organized in a line, at an incline going up to the right ending at 10, then numbers 11-19 are doing the same thing, but inside a dimly lit, floor-less room made of white walls and a low ceiling. This is literally how I imagine my numbers existing. In rooms, interacting with each other. Strange, I know, but to me, I find it strange that people don't think this way. I guess because it's all I've ever known. I drew the following picture to serve as a visual representation of how I picture my numbers in their spatial configuration.

Sometimes my synesthesia can help me, other times it can hinder me. It's useful when I have to remember a sequence of numbers. I can remember things like student IDs because when I read them on paper or a screen, they are put into my mind as "white and green, double blue, purple-clear-white, purple-orange-black." This goes for phone numbers and social security numbers, too. It can be a pain in the neck, though, when you're trying to do a math problem that includes sine and cosine and radians and theta and angles, and the only colors you can rely on are the few numbers involved in the problem. There are no patterns of colors you can remember, you can't do these kinds of problems like everyone else, when you've always learned math through the colors in which the numbers are associated with. No matter how hard you try to retain what you've been attempting to learn, you find it so much harder to, because you've always used colors to remember and learn, and when those are taken away, you struggle. And it doesn't help that certain letters and numbers are associated with one another, either. So even when you know then answer to a problem is 7, you write accidentally write Y instead, turn it in like that, and get points off because you wrote the wrong thing. And it sucks that you have no idea why you do this, you just do it.