Move Your Fucking Mic!

I have misophonia.

Shit you don't notice drives me batty.

Watching videos or listening to some podcasters is like this for me:

"The GASP thing we're talking about GASP here SMACK is the sounds GASP made by them trying SMACK to GASP breathe and seem to SMACK always have sucked their GASP cheeks in when they GASP pause dramatically GASP between sentences."

The mic picks this up because they put in the wrong place or have the settings wrong.

This is not the least reason that I prefer to read rather than listen to someone drone on about a topic.

Another, informative, YouTuber, Mark Smith of the Four Boxes Diner's delivery drives me nuts as well.

He will emPHAAAAAAAAsize a word in his repetitious style and it's like nails on a chalkboard for me.

Ironically, actual nails on a chalkboard doesn't trigger me at all.

Anxious

Well, the anxiety is not getting better.

It's affecting my enjoyment of going out for a beer and that, in turn, is affecting the enjoyment of the people I'm out with.

The depressing solution is two birds with one stone and remove myself from the situation before I ram into it.

I'll prolly be missed... at least I hope I am... but it might be best for everyone.

I'm not quite to agoraphobia levels.  I feel like I'm a long ways from THAT.

But I'm unhappy about it and very worried it's dragging friends down with me.

They deserve better.

It Does Not Mean Fake

I realized that I get bristly about some topics of mental health because I'm a sufferer of something that's invisible.

Misophonia is obscure enough that it's not even in the DSM.  Yet.

They've really only started to study it.

Does that make it fake?

Am I faking it?

Nope.

It's happening, I'm experiencing it.

I fervently want to be able to sit someplace and have someone eat nearby and not be upset by it.

Don't assume that just because something is psychological that someone is faking it.

Don't assume that what they do to cope with the problem is intended to slight or insult you.

Have some fucking compassion, because they have to live with it every damn day.

You just have to deal with it in passing.

Try to understand it.

That said, I'll stand right there with you and go after the people whom ARE faking it to get attention.

Those assholes make it harder for people with real problems to get the help they need.

Especially, they prevent people doing research from exploring new areas and finding treatments.

I Am Not Alone

 Gum chewing lawsuit can proceed.

As a sufferer of misophonia, I applaud this decision and hope she gets paid.

I know the stress it puts on all my friends and family when I'm past my saturation point and can't take it anymore.

Sounds Of Silence

This is a nice summation of how frequency deafness behaves.

I have other fun things going on with my hearing.  Tinnitus and misophonia make it extra fun.

"It's quiet.  Too quiet." is something that I encounter.

Often times the goal is to hit that "noise soup" point so the discrete sounds that are triggering the misophonia are lost in the cacophony.

It's why I can often handle eating in a restaurant with friends and being utterly unable to stand the experience of their mastication at home.  It's especially bad when I'm not eating at the same time.

I've tried to explain it, over and over, but nobody seems to listen.

That leads me to think that they're doing it on purpose, just to torment me.

Or they just don't care.

Even more fun is realizing that it can make me hard to be around because the people who are making an effort to not set off the problem have to MAKE that extra effort with me and nobody else they know.

I tend to withdraw.

Somewhere along the line, some connection in my little pea-brain got fried and I started getting anxiety attacks.  It took forever to identify them.

I already trended down the introvert spectrum before I caught aversion to settings where I would be subject to eating noises and now I also get anxiety when I anticipate facing those noises in settings where I know there will be no covering white or pink noise.

If you really want to see me freak out: Remove my ability to escape by controlling the transportation THEN ignore my desperate pleas to leave.  Triple word score if you order lunch and eat it in front of me while I'm in the "must remove myself" panic attack.

Now To Get It Defined As A Disabilty So I Can Cash In!

I've long known that my sensitivity to sound was called misophonia.

Being pissed off at the fucking twitchers is called misokinesia.  I did not know that.

They're just now noticing it scientifically.

I wonder how I get in touch with the researchers.  Being a sufferer, I might be able to offer some insights.

Don't Go Outside

Misophonia is a "joy".

But even more fun is my friends not listening to my explanation or remembering how it affects me.

Oh! for a malady which is visible on the outside so my friends could remember it!

I'm sick of explaining it, over and over, to my friends.

I'm sick of dealing with the people who set it off.

I'm sick of my friends introducing me to someone who's setting it off and not noticing that I am withdrawing from everything to escape the source of the problem.

When I walk out without saying anything, having reached the limits of my endurance, they're suddenly, "what's wrong?"

Same thing that was wrong 20 minutes ago when I mentioned your new friend was making clicking noises and you didn't lean over and even try to ask them to calm down.

Pscyhological Does Not Mean Fake

There's two huge reasons why I get pissed at bigots who can't grasp something like gender dysphoria and separate it from being a child molester.

First, the class I didn't take that would have completed my bachelor's of science in psychology was English.  3 credits of English separated me from graduation with the degree.

It's not that I didn't learn the material, my summer internship convinced me I didn't want to be a psychologist.

Second, I have an invisible psychological problem.  Two, really.

Misophonia is real and obscure.  You've no idea how many times I have to remind close friends that what they're doing is setting it off.

It's just as irritating for them to accommodate me as it is for me to deal with their small movements and noises.

Being constantly dismissed because I have no physical indication of affliction and the person not understanding what I'm dealing with is very frustrating.

There's a third thing too.

Way back in high school, when I was being bullied constantly for being a gamer and dirt-head...

The only other clique in the entire school that treated us gamers as humans were the queers.

Not the computer nerds.

Not the jocks.

Not the cheerleaders.

The queers.

You people who didn't get your comment approved?  You sound just like the jocks who'd torment us because we really just wanted left alone.

I'm older and wiser now, and you assholes are meaningless.  You seek validation in the abuse of others because there's some failing of yours that you cannot bring yourself to face.

You should get counseling.  You could benefit from it.

Me, I've learned to have compassion for the suffering of others because I'm living with my own, personal, brand of suffering.

A suffering I cannot help, cannot treat and cannot readily explain.

Suffering from this is not a crime, not matter how tormented I am and how fervently I wish the idiot at the bar would stop chewing like a pig and bouncing his knee.  It's a crime when I attack him.

Dressing like a woman to alleviate a symptom of dysphoria isn't a crime.

Fucking a child is a crime.  EVEN IF YOU DRESS LIKE A MAN.  Which, by the way you uneducated dolts, is how most molesters dress.  The molester seeks camouflage, to be invisible to evade attention.  Children twig on someone dressing unusually, and that puts them on guard.

But you were so damn eager to be a bigot you didn't bother checking what the real circumstances of pederasty are.

Oh Please Be True

People chewing gum like the march of a thousand wet vaginas is a constant torment to someone with misophonia.

Turns out that gum contains lots of something called BHA or BHT.

These things have been linked to cancer.

Gods but I hope so.

Anti-Social

Monday and yesterday I was all out of socialization juice.

Willard dragged me out anyways.

Happily, he dragged me to the range yesterday.

A little recoil therapy is good for the soul and brightens a grim day!

Thanks Willard!

Now if I could just manage to wake up feeling rested, everything would be all better.

I Am A Sufferer

Misophonia

Demophobia

Misophonia is the hatred of some sounds, common noises really.

It includes a spectrum of small movements and twitches.

It's characterized by an inability to filter out sense memory and then having that sensory input trigger an out of proportion anger response.

It makes being around people very difficult.

There's a dissonance from knowing what manners requires of us and wanting to scream, "chew with your fucking mouth closed, sit still and spit out the fucking gum!"

Among a small group of people you can at least ask, "would you kindly stop, please?"  The more people, the less likely it is you can ask, let alone get, them to stop.

So you develop crutches to get you through the day.

Today I realized that I depend on others exhorting me to come to social events before I can confront my affliction and be around a mob of people.

Guess what didn't happen with GRPC...

There's nobody attending who's saying, "C'mon Thag!  It'll be fun!"  I didn't realize I needed someone to say that before I could even try to get my shit together and go, until today.

I realize that I was dropping hints at a couple people, who didn't pick them up, and probably didn't even realize I was hinting.  I can be wonderfully self-defeatingly vague when hinting.

The Bells! The Bells!

Am I the only person who wants to take a spray-bottle to the Salvation Army person and use to train them like a cat to NOT ring that headache inducing bell?

Gun Videos

Asthma seems to be a common gunsmith ailment.

"Take your GASP punch and GASP remove the GASP roll pin."

Calm

Calm is strange to me.

I am almost never calm.

The misophonia always makes me agitated.

I can appear calm, but I am on the edge of "or flight" pretty much all the time.  There's no fight, how do you fight a sound or a twitching foot.

Yet, at this moment, I am calm.

I also have a fever.

The Boy has had the flu or something for about a week.  I think I am coming down with it.  I am mainlining orange juice and the surprisingly pleasant 12 hour cold/flu liquid.

I think that the sinus pressure is making my tinnitus really ring, and that seems to be covering some of the sounds that would otherwise be intruding on the calm.  If only I could achieve this without getting sick in other ways.

The misophonia is notably absent when I am well buzzed too.  That's handy because that means I won't get angry while I am drunk.

Calm is scary to me.  When addressing other issues we discovered that I am wired oddly in lots of ways.  Perhaps being on the edge of "or flight" 24/7 develops a different response to danger.  I get CALM when I'm seriously convinced that I'm about to be severely injured or killed.  This is super handy when you play around with race cars (and I'd prolly notice it less if I had more talent).  Time also runs funny.  Being calm and having a whole minute to think about the next second is really cool.

Calm has often meant danger.

I am calm and there is no danger.

Misophonia

My hearing problem has a name!  It has been diagnosed as a lack of working memory (called sense-memory in the classes I took) where memories were being flagged as important enough to be retained as short-term memory and thus weren't something I could let fade into the background.  As if everything was flagged, "important, read now!"

But treatments for that don't work.

I've been treated for ADHD, and the treatments were ineffective.

I recently stumbled across what it most likely is; I have misophonia.  Joy of joys, no cure-no treatment.

I remember when some sounds first started bothering me too.

Like many stay at home mothers, my mom made some extra cash babysitting.

Those kids raised with different table manners would smack their lips.  It drove me nuts and I couldn't explain why.  I was probably in 2nd or 3rd grade.

The problem advanced as I got older.  First chewing, then breathing, then tapping then movements.

Couple this with hearing damage where the whole world seems muted but the frequencies where most of the irritating sounds seem to be.  I can hear bass VERY well.  Subwoofers are a joy (Gods but English needs a sarcasm font!).

I wear earplugs all the time.

I have a fan running all the time and not that stupid expensive silent Dyson shit neither, the cheapest noisy POS from the hardware store because it makes noise.

I read that tinnitus and misophonia are bedmates.  I've got tinnitus too.  My dad was crew chief for an amateur fuel/altered team when I was a wee little one, I was driver of his team's something-stock car, I was in the Army before they realized that tanks caused lots of hearing damage and I am a heavy metal fan.

I learned late that my hearing is precious.  I do want to keep what I have left, but the misophonia makes me not want to hear so much of what I can hear.

My most fervent wish while synesthesia like cross wiring to the fight-flight response has me in its grips that the person annoying me will be annoyed by something that drives them as insane as what they're doing to me does.

People who don't realize that what they're doing can be annoying never seem to grow any empathy until they're hurting as much as the victim.