I had to look up synesthesia and misophonia. Having one of those sounds hard enough, but having both must be extremely difficult.
I never knew misophonia was a real thing, but I think I have it too. Sounds like the car's turn signal clicks, or someone tapping their fingers on the desk, usually drive me crazy. When I was in the hospital, the beeping from the machines was driving me so crazy that I thought my head was going to explode.
Yeah, that sounds like misophonia. I only drive with very loud music so as not to hear all the clicking and indicators, but one of the things I hate about Ubers is that the passenger can hear the app making all those sounds when the driver gets a new order. Makes me physically shudder.
I once lived next to a hospital, the A&E wing where all the ambulances would arrive, and after that my insomnia never went away, it’s been many years. There were really loud, screechy birds in that area, too. Most ‘normal’ people liked the fact there was so much green, nature, birds and all, but I slept in earplugs, noise-cancelling headphones and those ear muffs one on top of the other. Didn’t quite help, either, I could still hear it all. I haven’t really slept well since, Sunday night I literally got no sleep. It’s was 37 degrees Celsius where I live, to be fair, but it’s more that my neighbours on both sides had barbecues, kept talking into the small hours, I could hear every word, all the clanking cutlery, it’s honestly enraging and so so so exasperating.
I’ve always been very sensitive to sound, people chewing, buzzing, motorbikes, just any sort of noise, and I started listening to music non-stop all day outside of lessons when I was about 7, 8 to drown that out. It was mainly to escape the noise, though now that I’ve read up on misophonia on Reddit and the like, becoming a melomaniac seems to be a relatively common response to having it, because you’re trying to isolate yourself from external sounds, and that leads you down a rabbit hole of discovering new music all the time. That’s a hell of a silver lining.
Synesthesia for the most part isn’t ’difficult’; I’ve always felt it enhances my experience of the world, ever since I was tiny. There are different forms of synesthesia, and I have most of them in a kind of melange, so I often taste words, smell sounds, letters have an innate colour to them. There are also things that are harder to articulate, such as time having a shape (not the ‘week shaped like a page of a school planner’-type thing, which many people have, but the year and ‘time’ in the abstract having a sort of rotating shape, that kind of thing).
My best friend thinks it’s all related to being autistic which she thinks we both are. I’m not so sure. Then again, she has neither synesthesia nor misophonia, and I think despite my being incredibly weird and constantly out of place irl (and here every so often), I’m not autistic.
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