The sound of silence
About 15 years ago I used to go to hard rock and heavy metal music concerts every once in a while with my friends. Every night going back home after the show I had the typical buzzing sound in my ears that you get after hearing loud music and then disappears after a couple of hours.
One night after a Motörhead concert I got back to sleep but this time it was going to be different. I woke up the next day and the ringing was still there. I wasn't really worried as I thought it had to disappear as it always did. The next day it was still there, and the next too…
After going to different doctors and being performed several tests I learned that the ringing had a name "Tinnitus" and it's a very common condition in workers exposed to high noise environments (construction, airport operators, factories, etc.) when they don't protect themselves properly. I also discovered some limitations of the human body that I had never thought about. Lastly, I was told that it was permanent and nothing could be done.
The first weeks were like living in hell. Sleeping was difficult, I had trouble concentrating and my anxiety levels were through the roof. I was in college at that time and I started to get these depressing ideas like "I won't be able to study again with this thing on my head", "I won't perceive true silence again in my life". Many cups of tea and weeks after, I started to relax, and with the passing months, I began to accept the new normal. I went back to business as usual, the sound is there but I learned to "don't care" most of the time.
For me, it was a test of patience and resilience. I had to switch to positive to recover from that experience which takes you down to the bottom.
3 years ago I had a new big episode after being careless and exposing myself to harmful levels of sound. As I already had had some experience I had some tools to manage it but anyways I suffered a lot again as it puts your mind and emotions under a lot of stress, fear, anxiety and catastrophic thinking. «Will I adapt to this sound again this time??»
I try to avoid places with excessive noise and to make people conscious about the dangers of loud sound. I find it hard sometimes as the average loudness of modern society is quite high. There are literally millions of people out there with some degree of tinnitus due to sound pollution.
If you ever had or you are going through an adaptation process to tinnitus lets be in touch.