I wonder if people with synesthesia were to make a consensus they could end up with the same color for happiness or not. I’m not synesthetic, but I do have a favorite color so I might be biased, and it’s yellow. TMI time, I could actually trace back this favoritism to one cause, i.e. this picture.
I didn’t like this picture because it’s yellow. I came to like yellow because of this picture. In high school, I was into this artist called Yusuke Nakamura. I used his artwork above for my blog’s profile picture and didn’t change it for 4 years or so. I had fun blogging. The activity and the community were my muse and my escape, one of my first windows to the world. I guess I got attached to my PP, it’s an artefact of a good time. This picture and the color came to be associated with happiness. Honestly, I don’t remember having favorite colors before that. To be precise, this is not yellow. It’s mustard or something, I don’t know for sure. And that was the color I initially liked. But time goes by and every gradient of yellow seeps into that special place.
It doesn’t help that a lot of delightful things are yellow; the stars, the sun (they’re white/other colors too but well not for 5 yo me), sunflowers, cornflakes, bees, corn, cheese, mango, nasi kuning, egg yolk, chicken nugget, it’s endless. A background can be as dull as possible but sprinkle some yellow and it looks great. Yellow resonates with me, and like constructive superposition, it’s uplifting.
As I get older, I become a lot calmer. Now I don’t just have a favorite color, I have color palettes I love that don’t necessarily have yellow all the time, and I just like all colors in general. Maybe I can be impartial this time? But yellow remains the happy color for me. Recalling the story of my yellow, I guess happy color is a very personal thing. Everyone has a different history and happiness could be a lot more colorful depending on where we see it from. What’s your happy color?
Written for a writing challenge with Jennie Yuwono
