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Notes -
The new ACX post on misophonia" is interesting.
I don't particularly suffer from misophonia, and hadn't heard the term before, but used to be more sensitive than average to, especially, television shows. My former housemate would watch the Big Bang Theory, and I intensely disliked the voices of the actors, along with the voice actors from shows like American Dad and Family Guy. My husband likes to listen to the TV in the background, and mostly wears headphones for these shows when I'm around. My husband, meanwhile, is extremely sensitive to the sounds of the neighbors' vehicles, which he can hear through the rock tumbler, white noise machine, and multiple other people in the house.
Some of the comments are also reminding me of the times I tried sleeping in rooms with ticking clocks, and took the batteries of of the clock, then reset it again the next morning. I think once I tried to muffle a clock under a lot of bedding as well. This hasn't effected me lately, but that's probably just because timing clocks are no longer standard.
I was homeschooled for unrelated reasons, and I have often been confused by "sustained silent reading" regimes in some of the worse schools. A third of the kids mess around, making small noises, while the other two thirds pretend to read. Sometimes I would attempt to read, and as someone who likes reading, I always found it completely impossible for more than a page, which I would immediately forget.
Lately, I've recommended Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" a couple of times. Somehow it came up with my mother this week -- I think in the context of why I don't paint. It's not the same, of course -- reading and writing or painting in open spaces -- households and offices without walls, where it's normal and expected for anyone to talk about anything at any moment, and the person who ignores them and asks them not to is in the wrong. Both my husband and I find it rather demoralizing, and exhausting. We are angry that there is no viable way to signal unavailability to talk in a way that doesn't hurt others' feelings. I remember my father saying that he had "run out of words." I have to stop writing now, because my daughter has followed me through a couple of rooms, to talk about ladybugs. She has, as I wrote this, read out loud all the letters on my keyboard, asked for a dry erase marker, asked for a drink, and talked for several minutes about ladybugs. She is, of course, more important than writing on message boards. But I am tired. I'm not sure how to make things better and less exhausting.
Adding, since this is already stream of consciousness, that my mother does not have misophonia, either, but is also an introvert. She remembers, and sometimes mentions distastefully, how 40 years or so ago her roommate went on and on about the royal wedding. After 40 years, this is still an unhappy memory!
Why are you writing on a messageboard at all while your daughter is around?
My wife also does that - face glued to her phone while the kid is around and requests attention - and unsurprisingly she reports that parenting is exhausting and unfulfilling. Now your case may not be nearly as bad, but I'm seeing a very obvious mistake in trying to combine screen-time and child-time.
This is all times. There aren't any times not like this.
My father bought himself a shed, installed an air conditioner, reptile cages, and bookshelves, and called it his study. I am not currently in a stage of life where I can do that. Despite having the physical space available, I do not currently have a room of my own. As an introvert, this is stressful, but the alternative was to not get married and have children. The alternative was never to be socially "on" all the time in my own house.
My daughter is much more extroverted than my husband or I. When we're both on break together, she will talk six hours a day if I let her. It's not really a conversation most of the time. She talks at me, nonstop. She won't even watch a TV show if I ask her to, or will bring the TV show to my lap, to watch it there. Her younger sister is more introverted, and likes to play with her for a while, but then plays by herself. Older daughter gets offended and angry, nobody in the house can match her social energy. She also gets home from school and I from work, and she wants to talk about imaginary worlds, rainbows, unicorns, princesses, and magic. Very seriously. For hours. I have no idea what to say, there's nothing I can say that makes a dent, that goes anywhere I could possibly want to go conversationally. I suppose when she's older she'll be more fun to talk to? She's fun to go on outings with. We all do very well on hikes, trips, going out to see new things. It's been dusty and miserable this week, though.
Of course I prefer to see my actual friends and talk with them, and my friends who married each other and also have three small children are planning to visit tomorrow, I will make them lunch, and I'm excited about it. But a person cannot enjoy only their husband's company and seeing their friends once a month, and all other adult venues are fundamentally childcare. Work is childcare (I teach 700 children at my job). Church is childcare. Shopping is childcare. Public events are childcare. All times and places are childcare.
I don't know what your wife or children or the general situation is like. Does she have a space she can go to and read a book or do something quietly? Do you? When do you have time to write on a message board?
On work-days my wife shares child care duties with her mother, and I sometimes drop in after work to take the kid out of depressed-couchbound-woman-land to hit the playground. When the child is in Kindergarten, my wife has half the day free to do as she please. And then she has pretty much the entire weekend off - seriously. Sometimes she does some light household work, but mostly she just cooks and then nothing. - , and from Friday evening to Sunday sleepytime it's dad time for as long as the kid is awake. She's pretty much like your older daughter: demanding of attention, always has her mind set on an activity or topic of conversation and tolerates no deviation from that, and can get very angry if she doesn't get her way. I guess that's how she keeps busy during weekdays, when everyone around her is trying as hard as they can to stare at their phones and forget their physical existence. On the weekends I make it very clear that it's dad-time. She gets attention all day long, no distractions, but she needs to play by Dad rules, which means no sweets, no screens, no screaming, being outdoors whenever possible and we get some chores done during the day. It works. We both have a good time, get things done, and for all that she gets to talk my ears off about volcanoes and the TV shows she watches with her mother and whatever imaginary game ruleset she just invented for the umptenth time in a day, but she has to do so while we get groceries, clean up the living room, or take a walk to check on what flowers are growing this time of the year, and sometimes those activities even break through and grab her attention and the topic of conversation shifts to what we're doing.
I have time to post on messageboards either after getting her to sleep, at which point I should be sleeping myself, or during work-days. Such as now.
I'll readily grant that our situations are not comparable. My observation is simply this: Trying to run and hide from the child to stare at a screen instead makes people miserable. Maybe alter the structure of your days or week to make a little room for yourself? Get your husband to take the kids for a while?
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There’s an industrial AC unit outside an acquaintance’s apartment. I can barely hear it but it absolutely enraged him, to the point of multi-year legal battles. Notably the original installation was dubiously legal.
I think ‘noise + injustice’ has something to do with it. Personally I can’t stand hearing political discussion I don’t agree with - I literally can’t concentrate until it goes away, even if it’s just on the radio. Maybe not the same thing. Notably text is basically okay.
I don’t think it’s just related to noise. My little brother was very hyper and could only pass the time on long journeys by teasing me. I didn’t like being touched in general but I HATED being touched by my brother. So of course he would lean on me in the back of the car, or put his hand just a bit too far over the handrest, or whatever. It got to the point where I went berserk when he so much as twitched.
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Chewing. In particular my wife chewing, a moment in which I feel as if I can hear every muscle in her mouth, movement of her tongue, excretion of digestive saliva, all the way to the swallowing. Caveat: I do not always notice this. Could it be the TV? She often has the television on as well so I think the mouth noises are muted usually, but when they aren't, all the sounds set me on edge. Or maybe it's just sometimes that it's so audible--meaning not always, but only some times, and at other times my mind switches off. I do not notice chewing in other people, though just recently my son ate a doughnut there at the table as I was typing something and it was as if he were suddenly chewing just like his mother. I nearly said something, but didn't--because really it's not his problem, it's mine.
Again, is this just me sometimes? Or is it them, all the time? Do people notice their noisy mouth-noising? Do I also do this and annoy other people? SA writes:
He also writes in that article about background noises. Something odd I've realized is that while background noise is ubiquitous in Japan--my rice cooker plays music when it's done, my bath plays an electronic riff of Canon in D when the bath is full, you hear announcers saying: "こちらは、男子のトイレ". THis means "This is the men's toilet." It goes on and on. In some train stations there are fake bird noises. I still don't know why (Someone here will probably tell me.)
None of it bothers me. But put me on a plane to the US with a bunch of Americans, or in a public space with Americans yakking on and on, or some random person yakking in English on their phone in Cleveland, and it's very annoying. Because I can understand every word, and have forgotten how to tune out the way I can subtly tune out Japanese speakers.
Also I had never heard of the McGurk effect mentioned in that article. Weird.
Anyway the chewing thing, maybe it's something bizarre about me, my wife, and, now, my son. Thankfully I don't worry about things too much, so I tend to just let it go because fuck it.
Based on the Asterix article, it sounded like chewing was one of the most common triggers, so apparently you're not alone. I can't really guess why, though. I would imagine that hewing used to be even worse, with older people losing their teeth?
I was once on a plane near some people who were in a Young Opera Performers program, which I know because they talked about that, and about the petty drama of their cohort, and about the clothing choices of some of their cohort members, all in very loud, clear voices that carried well through the plane. I can see how possessing a loud, clear voice might be a pre-requisite for being an opera performer, but did not at all appreciate their using those voices to go on about someone's clothing choices for half an hour.
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Thanks for linking. Not sure if it's the same thing, but irregular machine noises make it impossible for me to sleep. If a fridge-freezer or mini split hits a defrost cycle, or a car engine starts nearby, I'm up and not going back to sleep for at least 20 min.
Tell your husband it's not a mental disorder to dislike the Big Bang Theory actors. Now watching the show on the other hand...
Haha, husband doesn't actually watch Big Bang, just the former housemate. He watches lots of Seth Macfarlane shows, which I sometimes find entertaining if we watch it together and nothing else is on, but I hate so much as background noise.
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That post reminds me of how my uncle once was stabbed through his had and into a table with a fork at lunch by a co-worker for chewing loudly. It was such an insane overreaction that my uncle was more confused than angry. The co-worker was still fired though.
Are you being literal here? Having your hand pinned to a table with a fork sounds like a permanently crippling injury.
Eh, it wouldn't be pretty or fun, but unless you had incredibly bad luck and tore tendons and ligaments beyond repair, it would probably be managed with surgery and physiotherapy. The tines of a fork are rather small and sharp.
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