as small as a world and as large as alone

4:31pm July 26, 2015

bittersnurr:

Ok here is a question

is there a specific thing past “lol your entire nervous system is shit” that accounts for random volume changes in your hearing?

Like I didn’t notice until now because my old laptop had dedicated volume +/- buttons but this one DOESN’T and I have to use the volume on the task bar or use both hands to hit the function keys (WHY WOULD YOU PUT THE FUNCTION BUTTON ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAPTOP FROM THE KEYS THAT YOU NEED TO PRESS)

I have to CONSTANTLY change the volume around on songs. Like multiple times per song usually. Because for some reason it’s WAY TOO LOUD at the beginning and the longer the song goes it gets softer, so I have to turn it up in the beginning and back down near the end???

I am just now realizing this is probably why no one else is as angry about mp3 players being mostly touch screen ones now. I need to be able to easily adjust the volume constantly and with a touch screen that means I have to stare at the screen the whole song because you don’t have dedicated volume buttons that can be operated without looking like an ipod.

IDK I didn’t notice this until recently and it’s weird. It seems to be on the brain end not the ear end so idk what to do about it because I have a bad feeling I might be damaging the ear side of hearing by needing to turn the music up over and over again.

When I was 11 years old, I worked in the office at school sometimes.  It counted as points towards a “service” award (the school gave us little medals we could wear on our uniforms if we did things like that – it had once been a military school and that showed sometimes).  But I mostly did it because I liked the quiet and I liked doing “monotonous” work like stuffing envelopes that the secretaries could give to me so they could do more complicated stuff.  I really enjoyed it there and the secretaries got to know me and like me as a “very hard worker who never complains and never gets bored”, which I took as a high compliment.

And this was a time when my ability to communicate my experiences was erratic but beginning to come online a bit.  So… I had this bell I wore around my neck.  I think they’re sometimes called “harmony balls”.  It was explained to me as a ball with piano wire inside with a little metal ball inside that hit the wires and made a pleasant, soft chiming sound.

I told the secretary, “I don’t understand why, but sometimes this sounds soft and beautiful, and sometimes it sounds loud and jangly and hurts my ears.”

The secretary said something like, “I think there’s something wrong with you.”

As a result, I never told anyone about this again until I grew up and understood my autism diagnosis (which I didn’t have at the time this was happening, and I wouldn’t understand to any degree at all whatsoever, for years after I got it at the age of 14).

At any rate, I’ve had changes in my hearing volume all my life.  They seem to have something to do with the degree to which I’m overstimulated, which can be a sensory thing but it can also be a cognitive thing – like too much multitasking can bring it on just as easily as too visually busy a stimulus or too much noise or too much chaos in general.  Some of these things seem random sometimes, but there does seem to be a strong correlation with overload of various types.

My vision also varies greatly.  Sometimes it’s almost normal, but it feels at those times like it’s being held together, like everything will fall apart in an instant, and it does, and then everything’s all fragmented and weird-looking and moving around and distorted, to varying degrees.  And if I go to a totally new place, sometimes I actually go blind because my brain won’t keep up with all the new visual input.  Other times I get motion sickness from all the dancing images in new places and end up puking in ways that people say they’ve only otherwise seen in people who are severely drunk or seasick. 

(I didn’t used to be capable of motion sickness, and before that, the dancing visual images were weird but they didn’t bother me in the way they did after I became capable of motion sickness.  The vomiting in new places started at the same time that my ability to become motion-sick started – around age 16, seemingly brought on by a toxic dose of a medication that I was on for six to nine months before someone discovered the toxicity and took me off of it.  I also developed several new kinds of seizure and began having them every few minutes towards the end.  They did a blood level and 600 was a normal level of the medication, 900 was toxic, and I was around 1800 from what I remember.  In all the blood tests they’d done, nobody ever had taken an actual blood level of the medication before that.  They’d blamed all of my medical symptoms on anxiety or deliberate misbehavior.)

At any rate… yes, this happens to me.  Not just with hearing but with all of my senses.  There are specific situations that can trigger it or make it worse, but other times the fluctuation seems random.  It’s tied to autism for me, but if you’re not autistic (and I don’t know whether you are or not, and it’s none of my business to even guess) there’s probably plenty of similar effects that could cause the same sensory issues.

11 notes