Misophonia - My Story

Living with Misophonia

So, let's start with a simple definition of my condition. Misophonia simply translates to 'hatred of sound'. People who suffer with misophonia go through their days dodging any stressful situation, watching everyone around them to protect not just themselves, but everyone around them.

Imagine the typical sound of someone's nails scraping down a black chalkboard, or the screeching of someone's cutlery on a plate. It hurts right? Both sounds cause people to make a face and cover their ears. Now, those sounds cause pretty much anyone to have a negative reaction. For someone like me, someone with misophonia, a lot of sounds can cause the same reaction. Not necessarily because the sound is painful, but the sound may just trigger a negative emotion.

Each person has their own set of triggers and reactions, but each one of these triggers the same thing in the brain. The fight or flight response. The fight or flight response is a psychological reaction to what your brain may perceive as a harmful event, attack or a threat.

The triggers for someone with misophonia could be from pen tapping, the ticking of a clock, chewing or simply the sound of someone crunching a water bottle. Like a fingerprint, everyone has a different set of triggers, and everyone has a different response.

Now back to me. I first started to recognize my condition about five or six years ago when I was in year 8 at school. Before this time, I was aware that things bugged me a lot, but I didn't know it was a condition until then.

My memory is a little hazy, but I remember sitting in my room at the end of the bed with my older sister. I am guessing we were just chatting, but she is the one who told me of the condition and its name. She has it herself. I started becoming interested in finding out more and more about it, so I googled it. Throughout the next few weeks at school, I pointed it out to people. I didn't have any friends, but I always tried, and I assumed some people just tolerated me... they didn't. I also started to notice that my hearing was much better than anyone else's and I pointed that out too. Bad idea. The next few months consisted of bullying and teasing. At the time, I was unaware that it was bullying as I was indeed getting bullied for other reasons too. People would go about saying that misophonia wasn't real, that I was lying about my hearing being exceptional and trying to trigger me (they succeeded by the way).

It was from that point that I started to isolate myself whenever I could. I attended an all-girls private school at the time (Wykeham House School) and being a private school, it wasn't very big (around 370 students from nursery to year 11 to be precise) so it wasn't very hard to get away, although bullies being bullies, they go out of their way to find you if they want to. I kept to myself at a bench reading 'Adopted by Zalfie' fanfictions on my phone during break and lunch, and in class... well in class I just had to try to deal with it.

So that pretty much carried on for the whole two more years I was at that school. At home I didn't get to escape. I struggled with my parents eating and tapping habits. My dad has been doing these grammar things on his Dictaphone in the spare room he calls his office. This room is situated next to mine with a thin wall in between (they added the wall to split the two rooms before I was even born). This means that I hear most of what sounds in there. My dad has a very low and raspy voice, so the vibrations also transfer through the wall. One of my triggers happens to be hearing sounds like voices and tablet videos through different rooms, so hearing my dad talking through a Dictaphone is a big trigger for me, let alone the beeps from the device itself. After messing up my room in rage and cradling myself on my bed with my nails dug into my skin for days on end, I finally went to him. I was unsure of what to say exactly but I was hoping that my solution would work. I opened his door and asked him to speak quieter. This didn't work (that and he never actually spoke any quieter anyway) so I tried music. I never owned any working earphones, so I loaded YouTube up on my laptop and turned the volume all the way up (this wasn't actually that loud by the way) and I put some Now albums on, lifting the speaker close to my head. This didn't work either, so I resorted back to my fingernails and on a rare occasion, a broken ruler or a blunt pair of scissors.