Being neurodivergent(without hearing loss, at least) means that a silent room is never actually silent
Without fully sound-proof headphones(and honestly, even with those headphones) a silent room is never silent.
Being neurodivergent in a silent room is hearing the wind outside blowing against the house’s walls and down the chimney, its constantly hearing driving cars from blocks away at all hours from many distances,Â
Its hearing your own breathing, its hearing the typing of someone from down the hall even with their door closed, hearing when they tap and while they scroll the wheel on their computer mouse,
Its hearing the sound of every single time the walls shift and creak just a tiny bit, its hearing the sound of the fizz in your soda constantly pip-popping as it slowly goes flat without even holding the cup to your ear, the sound of your laptop fan as it tries to cool itself
Its hearing the sound of kids in other classrooms on different floor levels shuffling chairs or laughing, its hearing the sound of a buildings air conditioning or heating turning off and on every single time,
Its the sound of the ever constant ringing that lingers in the back of your head because you spend so much of your life listening to loud music to hear things clearly or block everything else out because you hear everything, because your brain didn’t quite develop in a way that gave you the natural ability to block out that constant extra noise so you had to figure out how to do it manually, even if it hurts you in the long run. Because if you didn’t? You’d always be on the edge between overstimulation and understimulation because of your divergent brain, and it will traumatize you.
And that’s just being in a silent room on your own, by yourself. It doesn’t include hearing other peoples breathing, or when they smack gum or chew food or drink liquid, or breath, sigh, cough, sneeze, move, hum, whistle, talk, etc. Every sound you hear, your neurodivergent brain takes a little extra energy to register what it is, because if it doesn’t, it freaks out about the unidentified noise and then that noise is all you can focus on until you figure it own, and know you’re safe again.. Its the ever constant micro-shifting of attention to what’s going on around you because you’re pretty much irreversibly attuned to the world around you.
So now, imagine that its not a silent room anymore, just quiet, and you add every new sound onto the list of things you can hear when it is quiet. The list just grows and grows, doesnt it? Every thing you can think of, from the shuffle of feet or heels on tile to the shuffle of paper or scribble of pencils and fingers tapping on a keyboard, from the sound of someone’s phone pinging a notification to the nearest turned on tv buzzing or the nearest clock ticking unfalteringly.Â
The energy it takes to focus on the Loudest Sound vs. the Most Important Sound, I.e. trying to hear your teacher speak to you over the clattering students filling halls during passing period, or trying to hear someone ask you something when the TV is on and your doing the dishes with the sink running.
It’s like trying to fish out strands of loose clear fishing line in a babbling muddy brook, not impossible, but a serious challenge for something that should be somewhat simple.
Its not that we inherently have bad ears, or hearing-loss, its that we hear everything, and have no filters in our brains to block out extra stimuli, and in our brain we can’t easily separate what needs to be heard from all that we’re hearing.
And that’s not even getting into the neurodivergent aspects of whether our passive brain even realizes that we’re supposed to be listening to you, realizes that you’re talking to us, or if we can actually process what you said the first time around.Â
Its not a choice, its not selective hearing, we can’t control it, and its not our fault we were born like this.
When we’re having a mental shutdown from overstimulation because its too loud and too much, when we’re asking you to repeat yourself one, twice, three times- it’s not because we’re trying to aggravate you or trying to ignore you, its because we genuinely cant understand you and desperately want to.Â
The fact that if we ask you to repeat yourself more than once instead of letting you drop it or just nodding along means that we trust you enough not to immediately brush us off with a frustrated ’never mind’ because I promise you we hear it more than we’d ever want to.
The world is louder than you think.
