Do you ever wonder if we do a disservice to children by asking them to name a favorite color too early in life? With such limited life experience, by what criteria does a child even decide? It seems like innocuous small talk on the surface, but once you’ve named your favorite color there’s a tendency to commit to that decision for the long haul. It’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll wake up tomorrow and spontaneously declare that now my favorite color is blue. That doesn’t imply preferences can’t change over time either.

Maybe it’s the innocence intrinsic to the childhood experience that gives our answer such impact. When I asked my young nephew what his favorite color was, I could see clear physical indicators of the thought being put into his response. His eyes rolled up and back, he moved his hand to his slightly elevated chin, then replied “purple!” with an unmistakable air of confidence. The certainty of his assertion in juxtaposition to his age is so awe inspiring that I’m almost jealous. We know the kids are right. The fact that I feel a need to protect him from the prejudices of society makes me wonder just how much of my preferred palette is a product of the environment where I grew up.

The reality is that my favorite color was undeniably influenced through social interactions. I distinctly remember a time when would tell people that my favorite color was black. This caused problems with other kids my age. “Black’s not a color! It’s the absence of color!” was so frequent a response that the very question of my favorite color would make my blood boil. It would make me see red. At some point I grew so tired of always having to argue with people about the definitions of color and hue that I eventually gave up the fight and started saying red instead. It worked rather effectively. People tend to associate red with anger and cede you more space as result. This can be quite rewarding when you’re as introverted as I am. It’s no surprise that the choice stuck, but something about this never sat right with me.

Part of me feels guilty that I didn’t defend my choice of black more strongly than I did. Every computer I’ve ever worked with has treated black as a valid color. Looking back, there’s an obvious explanation for this anti-black sentiment that I was too young to understand at the time. No one notices the contrast of white on white. If I would have claimed white as my favorite color, would it have been subjected to the same level of scrutiny for being “not a color but all colors”? I’m not really sure. The people that seem to most enjoy the fog are the same people that get offended when light passes through a prism.

Another part of me feels slightly hypocritical for simultaneously loving red and hating pink when I know the two colors are essentially the same hue. There was a very prevalent stigma attached to boys who liked pink. Much like the people who attacked my choice of black as a non-color, I engaged in similar form of mental gymnastics to assert that my favorite color was red was not pink. Perhaps it’s not really a question of “if” I was pressured into my color choice by social factors, but to what degree I tried to be what other people think of when they see me. There’s no denying that I preferred blood over bubblegum in my shades of red.

I’ve never been particularly good at understanding how people see me. There’s this shared connection people tend have between colors and feelings but sometimes I’m not sure I experience things quite the same way. If you lead me down a rainbow hallway I’ll choose the red door, but I will simultaneously see that red door and want it painted black. It’s hard not compare the way I tend to suppress my feelings with the way I avoid bright colors, but I think saturation and intensity both fall short of the metaphor I’m looking for here. Black is not necessarily the absence of feeling. Black is the shade on a hot summer day that provides you with reprieve from the relentless sun. Black is a warm trench-coat on a cold winter’s morning. Sometimes I need that armor which only the void can provide.

To make this analogy between colors and emotions work, perhaps it would make sense to add the concept of an alpha channel. In graphics programming it’s common to augment our definition of color from red, green, and blue to include opacity so we can express an image in layers. Emotions work like this also. Sometimes an emotion is relatively translucent and I see through it well enough to go on with my day. Other times an emotion is so opaque that I literally can’t see anything else. Grief is often the primary culprit of this. Grief stacks on layer after layer of blue on blue, heartache on heartache, until your vision disappears completely.

I already had a hard time distinguishing feelings, so learning how to recognize the layers of multiple emotions together was a difficult process. I could normally manage my rage on its own, but this phenomena of simultaneously being sad and angry was a burden I wasn’t prepared for. I felt lost in this purple haze, not knowing if I’m coming up or down. It used to be that red made me happy by pulling me out of my blues, but now the misery just follows with me. It’s like this painful bruise under my skin that I just have to bear with until it heals. Perhaps this is how purple came to be associated with courage.

Perhaps somewhere deep down I’m afraid of what purple represents. It’s so much easier for me to logically separate purple into red and blue than emotionally engage in the combination. When you find your pleasure in clouds of bright red cotton candy, it’s trivial to direct your hostility towards the cold blue steel it’s locked behind. Having a clearly defined prey to hunt makes life simpler for the predator. It’s much harder to accept that I’m drawn to the prowl because the thirst for blood distracts me from the river of tears I’m floating down. The reality is that I was raised in a world which portrays feelings as an impediment to survival and purple got caught in the crossfire.

I find it interesting how if you filter out the red and blue from white light you’re left with green. It seems like an appropriate metaphor for the unsatisfied hunger I feel. When you’re surrounded by mountains of purple, the grass is always greener on the other side. Feeling nothing at all would be preferable to feeling pain, but for every step forward I take I wind up sleepwalking back again. It makes me wonder if my efforts at suppressing feelings are ultimately futile. Maybe I need to learn how to scout my feelings from a higher altitude so I can figure out which bridges actually lead to verdant pastures and which ones I’ve already reduced to embers.

It’s here on this boundary between red and green that I’m starting to find hope again. In this stop and go world, we tend to think of red and green as opposites because that’s how our eyes work. However, it’s important to remember that these colors can be combined. When you mix red and green paint together it turns a disgusting greyish-brown, but you add red and green light together it produces a brilliant shade of yellow. A simple change in perspective can have huge consequences. It used to be that I associated yellow with fear, but now I’m starting to see it more optimistically as an opportunity for growth. Embedded in this line between red and green is a whole spectrum of yellows from the shade of fertilizer to shining sun. When the traffic signal turns yellow, do you speed up or slow down? Sometimes we need to do something that seems scary at the time in order for it to turn into something beautiful later.

Back when I was a teenager, I owned a pair of sunglasses with amber lenses and noticed something interesting happen when I’d take them off after wearing them for a while. Everything turned blue. In much the same way our eyes treats red and green as opposites, they also treat blue and yellow. When everything you see is displaying shades of gold naturally, your brain gets used to seeing the world like that and begins to filter it out. It seems fitting that yellow and blue have this relation. Trying to see hope in everything is so exhausting that I wind up seeing only the sorrow.

I think what makes these feelings difficult is my lack of control over them. They come down on me like rain. Part of me knows that both the sun and rain are necessary for growth. That’s the only way the roses bloom. The other part of me is scared to embrace what I can’t control. Bruce Lee taught me that there was power in being like water, but sometimes when it rains it floods. In times like that it’s Brandon’s line from The Crow that keeps me moving forward. I tell myself “it can’t rain all the time” as I try desperately to make my peace with the tears.

The first book I that I recall reading by a Black author was Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, so I revisited the film recently in preparation for this post. To say I didn’t understand it at the time would be a massive understatement. Looking back, part of me is kind of glad that I didn’t get it. I was so privileged that I didn’t even have a frame of reference for that level of suffering. I didn’t know what it was like to stand in the purple rain and be resigned to watch as destruction falls from the sky on everything you care about. I couldn’t imagine the courage it takes to feel that kind of pain and still be capable of laughter and compassion. In some ways it was better for me to not know these things in the same way I do now. Some feelings are best left unfelt.

In an effort to show solidarity with my nephew, I made it a point to wear my purple shirt around him. Note that I say “my” instead of “a” because at the time of writing this I literally only have the one. I’m the type to primarily dress myself in blue, red, black and grey. Heck, I even bought myself a grey guitar to play. Yet, my lone purple shirt represents something special to me. I only own it because Dr. Val Brown and a compassionate group of educators decided to #ClearTheAir by openly talking about racism on Twitter. It features the following quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

“…persistent trying, perpetual experimentation, persevering togetherness. Like life, racial understanding is not something we find but something that we must create.”

As I’ve started to wear it more, I’m finding that I’ve become increasingly more comfortable seeing myself in shades of lavender and indigo. Maybe I look good in purple. Maybe there’s some alternate universe where my favorite color is violet or magenta– a place where I felt truly free to dream in color. Yet I’m so used to dreaming in ones and zeros that I have a hard time even envisioning that in my head. Somehow my brain can imagine that it sounds something like music though– a harmonious cacophony.

It’s easy for me to imagine dreams of blue. It’s easy for me to imagine dreams of red. But dreams of purple still feel elusive. The color itself feels like an illusion. Colors are to light what pitch is to sound. Red light has a low frequency and blue has a high frequency. Purple is a frequency of light that’s so much higher than blue that it starts to appear red again. Because the range of our vision is limited, we perceive the top and bottom of the color spectrum as forming a loop. Perhaps dreaming in purple is like dropping or raising your voice an octave to harmonize with a signer that’s outside your range– two dreams coming together as one.

I know better than to assume I can just snap my fingers and be in a different world. At the same time, I don’t want to give up hope for a better one either. It’s not within my power to remove all possible sources of pain from the world, but maybe there are steps I can take to share the load. Just because red is my favorite color doesn’t mean I can’t dabble in adjacent colors. There’s plenty of passion to be found between grapes and gold. Maybe allowing myself to space to express myself through purple can be an act of resistance that provides a crack in the clouds for hope to shine through.

Maybe someone out there needs to see that it’s okay to be purple.

Maybe that someone is me.

[I’d like to thank the following sources for the vibe that helped me get through this: Robert DeLong, K. Flay, WALK THE MOON, Lola Blanc, Counting Crows, Elliot Lee, The Rolling Stones, Bobby Vinton, Jimi Hendrix, Oingo Boingo, Pink Floyd, Coldplay, 311, grandson, Jessie Reyez, Prince, and The Art of Noise. Thanks for reminding me what it means to feel human.]