Volume Adjustment
Updated on March 30, 2015.
We have very sensitive hearing - and we can also often end up using more volume than we realize.
This is because we pick up on very quiet background noise that many people aren't as sensitive to, and we try to adjust our speaking volume to compensate for the background noise. We're usually extremely quiet, so if we don't get louder when background noise is present, people end up asking us to repeat ourselves a lot, which gets annoying.
Because that background noise is louder to us than it is for most others [one of the reasons we have to wear our headphones on the rare occasion we make it out to Walmart], we can sometimes overcompensate when trying to be heard speaking over it. Because we can adjust very quickly to certain new states, and aren't very closely connected to the body overall, we often won't notice if our adjusted volume is more than necessary for other people to be able to hear us over the background noise in any given location.
This seems to happen especially often when air-conditioning or a ceiling fan is a factor, creating white noise; we tend to quickly adjust to it and tune out, then overcompensate for it when we try to speak over it, having grown accustomed to the new baseline volume of the environment.
It also occurs in relation to sinus issues, of which we have many. Depending on how congested we are and how the drainage stuff goes, that also impacts our overall volume. Occasionally our ears will suddenly pop and we’ll realize the world had sounded a bit more muffled before that point, without us noticing it, so we’d probably been louder than we realized while everything sounded muted to us. We’ve had chronic allergy shit going on since birth and nobody noticed until our twenties when the full-blown laryngopharyngeal reflux kicked in. (We spent four months bouncing between the ER and specialists, constantly nauseated and frequently puking up mucus, until the allergist lady was the one to figure out what was going on.) So yeah, I guess we just kind of got used to it from an early age.
On the other hand, when we're particularly depersonalized, derealized, and/or otherwise dissociated, we can barely hear anything at all from the outerverse, and if we do it's blurred and disjointed. We can rarely talk during those moments, but when we do, it tends to be extremely quiet.