This is actually something that people are intended to understand by design.
I miss the silence of empty rooms.
I developed tinnitus earlier this year, and now I'm never gonna be able to just sit somewhere quiet and far away from everyone else and be alone with my thoughts. This ringing will follow me everywhere, drowning out the distant sounds of cars disturbing puddles in distant streets on a rainy night, obscuring all the subtle little noises that danced on the edges of my perception. But most of all robbing me of any truly quiet moment for the rest of my life.
Condolences. I have a rain sound app on my phone. With earphones and practice, I can sometimes focus on that sound instead of the tinnitus, and get some semblance of peace and sanity.
It's brutal. It also just kind of becomes normal, eventually. Do what you can to protect your hearing going forward to prevent it from getting worse. Good luck.
This is not advice, because if I had heard this posted as advice in my first year or two of tinitus I would have been pissed at the person giving it. Also, to a very large degree even your emotional reaction to this is not something you can control.
I was absolutely devastated and hated myself when I got tinitus. I and a co-worker teaching international folk dance were invited to a dance party / concert.
Amazing band, flown in from another continent, but I knew it would be too loud. I've always had minor hyperacusis and been very concerned about protecting my hearing. Before the party started I offered disposable earplugs to my co-worker, she declined. I had my own pair, in my pocket, the entire night. For some reason I never put them on.
At the end of the night I leave the venue and have terrible ringing in my ears. I freaked the fuck out, and kept everything as quiet as possible for the rest of the night and the next day to try to allow my ears to heal. Immense guilt and kicking myself. And fear.
The ringing never stopped. Saw an audiologist, who said it would definitely go away in a few weeks. It did not.
Tried supplements that did seem to reduce the volume of the ringing (Lipoflavinoid. No idea if it was all placebo or not).
Saw many more specialists and eventually met one (more than a year later) that told me (no idea if current studies back this up) that sometimes Tinitus is not physical damage at all, and that it's damage in the way that our brains process the input from our ears.
He recommended that I "try not to think about it". Said that sometimes even helps the ringing decrease. I told him that I was not the type of person who could ever not think about it. Nor did I want to be. Exactly the opposite, I had pledged to myself to never just not notice it. Saying that now doesn't really make sense to me, but at the time it absolutely did. It was an integral part of my self-image.
So, I religiously took Lipoflavinoid every day for more than a year. Normally with my ADHD I would struggle with that, but every time I forgot it I would notice the ringing getting louder and remember.
Then, maybe two or three years in I would sometimes forget to take Lipoflavinoid and... Not notice. I still hadn't heard a second of silence for 3 years, but I didn't notice the volume increase.
Eventually I was forgetting it more often than not and didn't want to keep the hassle and pay for it so I just stopped.
Work got difficult and I would have other things to think about than the ringing, and every one in a while there were days where at the end of the day I would realize I hadn't noticed the ringing at all. (If I had that realization in a quiet room, I'd immediately start noticing it again)
I gave up trying to fix it. I managed to convince myself that accepting it did not go against the fiber of my self concept, and my experience got better.
It's been more than 10 years since that concert and I can say that I haven't been bothered by the ringing in years, and I'm in a relatively quiet room typing this out now and don't hear it.
Again, not advice. I can't tell you to "just ignore it", and if you're like me you can't make yourself do that even if you wanted.
If you're early in your experience with tinitus, maybe it will be helpful to hear that at least for one person, it got better. And that by "it" I mostly mean my experience of life with tinitus, moreso than the ringing itself "going away".
If anyone has read this far, fun fact that kind of goes against the general gist of this narrative:
Once I had tinitus I realized that I could be a surprisingly accurate and precise human drcibal meter by comparing perceived volume of my ringing to perceived volume of the environment.
Could get within about 3db in the range from 40 to 75 without earplugs, at which point I would put in earplugs and know how much to adjust to get the same precision up to 100db.
I generally refuse on moral grounds to participate in activities above 95db without all participants strictly being required to use ear protection.
Anything above 80, I set up a small table with free earplugs, even if I'm not the organizer...
Also, I haven't really tried to measure db this way in a few years. Don't know if I still can or not.
For what it's worth, I do find this somewhat reassuring.
I don't know if I'll ever get to where you are, but to hear that it could get better does make me feel a little less shitty.
Thank you.
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got jiggy for the first time in five years. After our third kid she just went completely off it and we’ve been in a dead bedroom situation ever since, she told me how she felt and despite my frustration I understood and respected her wishes. A couple of weeks ago I just opened up about how I was feeling unloved and then blam! It happened out of nowhere. I was in a daze and couldn’t believe it. Now I’m scared it’s going to be five years before it happens again.
I learned recently how the James Webb Space Telescope is not orbiting around Earth but literally orbiting around an empty point in space. I don’t think I even quite understand it, but it’s really cool
I've been dealing with this back pain under my right shoulder blade for like 6 years or so and I can't seem to figure out what's causing it or how to treat it. I think it's called "rhomboid pain". I've seen a doctor once and physical therapist twice and the best they can do is recommend I stretch and go get a massage. Yeah thanks guys. Totally haven't tried any of that.
I've always had a bad posture but it's been getting better yet the pain has gotten worse so I don't think it's that. I doubt it's weight lifting either because I had been lifting for almost 10 years before the pain appeared and taking a break doesn't make it better and lifting heavy doesn't make it worse. I don't think it's mountain biking either because the pain started before I bought my bike. I also got a new bed, tried different pillows, tried sleeping on my back, pillow under my knees. Sleeping on both sides with a pillow between my legs. Nothing. Also it's rarely bad in the mornings but rather on the evenings.
Well - it's still early to say, but I have a new idea what might be causing it and I think this might actually be it. I think it's because I switched from a desktop computer to laptop. It perfectly correlates with the time I started experiencing this pain. I now sit for hours and hours every day with my right hand extended to reach the trackpad. It has to be that. I now switched to mouse and a keyboard and let's see if that makes a difference. Only been doing that for few days now but I have zero pain right now.
Yep. I even got this back when cleaners moved my mouse from in front of key keyboard spacebar to the right of the keypad, until I noticed what had happened.
I put my mouse between my body and the keyboard and it goes away.
Good luck!
Yeah I'm a side sleeper aswell and my bad posture includes shoulders curled in. I've been meaning to get one of those elastic things that's supposed to pull my shoulders back. It's interesting when sitting against a backrest or using a foam roller my shoulder blades don't feel symmetrical. Like the right one is sticking out more.
How it feels to never have had anyone in my life that I could just randomly call up and talk about happy and sad things with.
There's a part of me that really wants something to take over my body or replace myself with an entirely different person who does all of the things I struggle with. Even if it wasn't a person, if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.
Oof.
I feel this all to well.
I highly recommend reading https://www.strugglecare.com/book .
It's not self-help. It's not going to "fix" you.
But reading it was some of the best therapy I've ever received. If you're at all like me, maybe it will help you too. I am happier, as are the people I love and who love me, in large part because of K.C. Davis' philosophy. (The people I love and who love me are also very empathetic and understanding, which I know is definitely not true for most people unfortunately).
It's less than $20.
It's short.
Buy it. If you can't afford it, I might even be willing to buy it for you / venmo you $20 to get it.
Also available in your library / Libby.
Also available as an audiobook.
Highly unlikely for an individual isn't the same as highly unlikely across a population. 0.1% is only one chance in 1000 - rolling the same number 3 times in a row on a 20 sided die has a probability of 1 in 8000, but you'll find loads of stories of it happening because there's a lot more than 8 thousand people who play D&D.
Your chooks are rolling along the edge of probability, but there's more than 1000 chickens in the world so the probability someone will hit that jackpot is close to 100%.
I’m thinking about purchasing a new clarinet mouthpiece and investigating and trying them out and I don’t know that many other people who care about it as much as I do
I know the feeling and also I'm curious, what's the difference here? What choices present themselves?
