The sound of silence

This morning I have woken up early after making the decision not to go for a run. I feel so overwhelmed after reconnecting with my  autistic self that my head feels funny. I feel like Josie did when she was younger and wanted to know how black holes are made so we went to the planetarium to find out. I feel like my diagnosis was the big bang and I’m still dusting off the debris and rebuilding the authentic Susie. I can hear the omnipresent low level white noise after shock the sonic boom. My autistic ears are the most significant aspect of my diagnosis, the most noticeable change. It’s very much like now they have been given recognition, I can’t turn them off. They are continuously screaming at me, “you feel sound” . It’s noises that wake me up at night. The hearing part of my brain can’t step away from the hyper vigilance caused by the avalanche of trauma I’ve had to revisit in the last 4 years. The are the main character.

I used to think there was something wrong with my hearing because I couldn’t hear the thing I was supposed to be paying attention to. What my diagnosis did was help me to understand that I wasn’t paying attention because my brain had zoned out  and turned off because it heard everything and couldn’t filter all of the information and focus on just one aspect. When I relive the traumas of my past, they are like silent movies which layer the images and the emotions of separate traumas into a swirling emotional storm but there is no sound. The soundtrack is disconnected and appears as external interference from the here and now. 

Not long after I started studying for my masters in autism studies I interviewed an autistic person who had Hyperacusis, a condition where the individual has acute noise sensitivity. This was so relatable, however for this person the distress and negative impact it caused for them was so extreme that they wanted an operation to make them deaf. There are other hearing differences experienced by autistic people such a misophonia, where certain sounds make you angry or phonophobia where some sounds trigger anxiety. For me I think it’s more complicated than meeting criteria for specific medicalised disorders. We live in a noisy world and so it’s important for me find ways to manage that now that I am aware it’s an issue for me.

Reducing anxiety 

This is where I use input to reduce output and music is the thing that helps the most. I have seasonal playlists, not based on the orbit of the sun but more related to significant periods of time for me. These are the playlists that I use when I go for a run, early in the morning when the world is silent and beautiful. Running allows me to access states of flow and that helps me which is one of the reasons I am researching this for my PhD. I capture that moment in my whole physical consciousness, what it looked like, how it felt emotional and physically and I mentally sync it to a song. Sometimes I make a TikTok to record these moments, sometimes I take photos but the key point is that the song / playlist triggers those memories and I can relive them. It’s a little bit like exploiting the essence of PTSD flashbacks and my knowledge of how they work. All the positive aspects of my morning runs are readily available in Spotify for times during the day, where noise causes anxiety, like going to the supermarket.

Short video of the silence of the early morning https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMRH7gP1b/