I Am Bad

OK, I've been outed as a noise nut and it's true.  I am crazed by noise.  I have to put my fingers in my ears when I'm on the street and a lorry passes, my whole insides turn liquid when the recycling bin men come by and tip boxes of glass into more glass.  I can't bear it.  I hyperventilate when the dog two doors down barks for twenty minutes.  Noise, like pain, makes me want to leave the planet, but before that to kill someone. 

I spend lunatic hours on Google checking out earplug sites.  None of them (of course) make silence happen.  I organised a visit from a technician to make moulds of my ears for custom ear plugs.  He didn't come.  Hope curled up and sulked.  Earplugs in any case are problematical.  Talking to the daughter who had a temporary problem with roadworks, she said she can't use earplugs because they stop her from thinking.  Which is weirdly right.  I seem (as she does) to need ambient air to think in.  Closing myself off makes my own internal sounds scream, or perhaps it's a kind of claustrophobia.  I've tried white and pink noise cds but they sound like noise to me.  Best thing I've found is Brian Eno's Music for Airports and Neroli.  Which makes the daughter threaten to disown me for naffness.  Anyway, I am a nutcase, I don't have much of a problem owning to that.

But it's actually worse than that.  Much, much worse.  Loud or sudden noise is painful but passes.  What I really hate is the noise of other people.  And that's dissembling, too.  What I really hate is the noise other people make that reminds me that other people exist.  There.  Children screaming and shrieking in the neighbouring gardens (it's hot in my glass study, I have to have the door open) sends me into a spiral of fretting and whimpering.  Do they really need to bellow in order to grow up well-balanced human beings?  Other people's hi fis, their drums, for god's sake.  I know about people's right to have rights, but if my inclination is for silence, it gets trumped by theirs.   I want to  sit in my room and not be reminded ('Do you HAVE to have that conversation in the street under my window?') that I am surrounded by other souls.  Something about the community-minded Sixties just didn't take with me.  I have fantasies about living in the middle of a field (preferably in a house) but the Poet points out that there's nowhere noisier than the countryside.  All those machines, and the birdsong., my dears.  I've spent time on retreat in convents and monasteries of silent orders, and it was wonderful, but there's the god problem (and the food is inedible).  It's like stealing silence.  I want it by right.

All this might sound like typical old lady complaint.  And it is of course.  Christ, the young!  Why don't they grow up...?  But actually apart from my new sense that my time is running out and can I please have things the way I need them while I still can, my vileness and non-fitness for purpose as a human being has always been like this.  I didn't want to hear the sound of the neighbours even when I was a kid.   I am ashamed, and then again, I'm not.   What can I tell you?  I'm bad, through and through.

Comments

[Tania]

Well i Find it Very Funny And im Not Taking The Piss, But Honestly How Can You Hate Noise That Much Unless You Have Very Bad Stress/ Anger Issues. im Only 14 You Probly Think i Dont Understand What im Talking About ...But Come on Sound is All Part of Lifee it's Not a Bad Thi9ng, yeah maybe loud sudden sounds, but it Cant Make you in pain. You Must Have issues...

[Katrina]

I found your blog because I'm going through a rough time with noise right now. So, the internet being the wonderful thing it is, I decided to explore why others feel they are this way. So through google, I am here.

I've been bothered by noise my whole life. Not just noise though. I can't stand crowds, the hustle and bustle. But noise, has been the bane of my existence. It and my reaction to it, has put me into such deep depression that I require medication, which seems to alleviate things not much at all.
Seems my whole life has been a quest for peace. Every move I make has been to set myself up for an eventual life of relative peace. So here I am, finally with my home in the country and guess what... still no peace.
It's to the point that I've developed a healthy hatred for most people because they are the source of the noise that I find so painful.
I don't know what I can do. Sometimes I wish I could go deaf.

[mary]

Ebay is great for cheap earplugs and i have found many are better than the ones in the shops, especially the little green petite ladies ones.
I moved to a quiet area but still jump when a car goes past, lots of people with M.E are hypersensitive to noise. Drives me nuts. Always ask people to turn music down in pubs and bars, most staff are surprised but don't mind.

[Pageturners]

My sister! I once stopped cycling and stuck my fingers in my ears as a motorcade raged past screaming. When they were gone and I unpopped, a man on the other side of the road gave me the thumbs-up. "That's showing the bastards," he said. I didn't like to explain that it wasn't actually a political comment, just noisyphobia.

[SUSAN HILL]

You should come here. We are surrounded by our 50 acres of silence. No other people. No traffic. Yes, birds but they are fairly quiet at this time of year except for the owls. A short burst of combining in August but that`s it. If ever we think we have to move as aged advances, we remember noise. But worse, we remember OTHER PEOPLE. And talk of moving ceases.

[Marina]

I think what you need are the Bose noise-cancelling headphones. None of the others work, I agree — I was given the Sony ones and they're next to useless — but the Bose, which cost the earth or at least $300, actually take away sound. Sitting in the Bose shop in a noisy mall testing them out, I was shocked and delighted and suddenly at peace.

[aineliva]

Thank God I am not the only one.

We have dumped the Dyson because the sound of it drove me out of the house. Why can't they put silencers on these things. Is it that noisy vacum cleaners alert the rest of the world that we are cleaning our houses.

[Overpowered]

It's not about age. I'm 27 and certain noises - bass thumping from upstairs, hammering and banging, endless tuneless whistling - drive me into a murderous rage. For me at least it feels like bullying: the person making the noise inflicts their life on others and it seems brutal and hugely intrusive.

[Zareen]

To Mike C.

"All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone."

Do you know, I think the last time I did that, I was ten. I must remember how. Now or never.
Glad I read that, glad you quoted it.

[Mike C.]

Not just me, then... Even in the Good Old Days I would patrol the house in the small hours looking for the source of some annoying noise, or smoulder all night as the boy two doors down held rowdy parties when his parents went on holiday. Then 10 Latvians moved in next door, with their life-enhancing music, drinking and smoking and jolly booming voices in the back garden at 3.30 a.m., and weekly full-on disco-volume Sunday barbecue sessions. Suddenly, the shrieking kids from over the back seem positively benign (at least they went to bed eventually). Look out for the headlines: Southampton Man Massacres Neighbours -- "He seemed such a quiet, normal person".

The combination of electronic amplification and a dread of silence is a curse. "All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone" -- too bloody true, but I don't think this is quite what Pascal had in mind.

[Sam Berrisford]

Hi JB,

Pisces with Pisces rising - I think. Does it matter?

I'm not sure Jenny would want her wonderful blog cluttered with astrological ramblings!

[Jenny]

I am strongly of the opinion that noise sensitivity is a question of hard-wiring. As children, my brothers and I were all convinced that our father's extreme sensitivity to noise was really just his way of saying that he wished he did not have any children. Now we have all grown up into noise-averse people who are sent to the verge of complete collapse by things like the crinkling of a plastic bag. The other day, there was a faint high-pitched noise in the background while I was doing my office hours--not like a fire alarm, but like the sound some cases for fire alarms make when they are opened, though I couldn't work out where it was coming from--and in the end I wrote on a large post-it "There is a high-pitched noise that is going to make me have a nervous breakdown if I stay in my office. Please e-mail me if you came to find me and I wasn't here, and we will set up an appointment for later in the week." And I went home. I really thought my head was going to explode! And later on I was talking to a friend who was about to have a scheduled C-section, & she was commenting on how bad she is with pain--and it struck me that the two things are very similar. I have an extremely high tolerance for pain, of course I would prefer NOT to be in pain all other things being equal but I don't really care if I am. I can easily ignore it. But this is not to my credit, it's just one of those things--whereas certain noises really are intolerable to me, I feel like I will totally lose it if I have to suffer them for another second!

[Martin]

Yes, yes, yes and yes. I agree with you completely about noise - and I am not even old (well, not THAT old). Oddly, I AM a bit deaf. I cannot tolerate certain noises and also want to commit murder when subjected to them. When I was living in London, it was the screeching on the Underground tracks that left me with fingers stuffed into ears, teeth gritted, down on my metaphorical knees and amazed at my neighbours' calm and at how they managed to continue their conversations.

[JB]

Hey Sam,
do you know what your ascendant is? I'm just curious.

[Pat Rosier]

Janet Frame, icon New Zealand writer, was known to be noise-averse. There are stories about her like the one that she moved house because her neighbours used a motor mower on their lawns every Saturday.

I find it interesting that a number of the comments on this item assign a 'diagnosis' to noise aversion (asperger's etc). Maybe there are people in the world, and I count myself among them, who just hate any kind of noise over which they have no control. I put myself out of the way of such noise as much as I can and get crabby when I can't.

[Meredith]

Are there noises you love? Like orchestras maybe? Just wondering...

[Crumpetty]

It's not just that you're Old - I'm the same (and Not Old).
If you *do* pick a field to live in, don't make it one that people of all ages insist upon using for intensive hours of football training. Now there's a noise that doesn't go well with trying to read, I can tell you...

But then muttering expletives under my breath at the six-year-old wannabe David Beckhams is probably theraputic, on some level.

[Sam Berrisford]

There are many quiet and peaceful places in the world, Jenny. You can choose to be in them if you wish.

Stop complaining about the consequence of your own life choices.

And a bit less of the 'old' if you don't mind. It's self indulgent and patronising and no excuse for intolerance. Or is there some bizarre sense of masochism at work here?

See if you can sustain the vitriol without suffering the pain. Move, and see how you like it.

[mr waggish]

Maud, there is evidence that it's related to autism, though it's contested. Supposedly, some autistic children responded very well to being put in total silence through headphones or what have you, as though their brain processed normal sounds as being deafening, disorienting and overwhelming.

[Maud]

P.S. -- A few months ago a friend pointed out that my site is the second hit on Google for "noise intolerance." The friend did not mention how this came to his attention.

[Maud]

Yes, the sounds of other people are definitely the worst of all.

I'm convinced, by the way, on absolutely no evidence, that this kind of acuteness of the senses is related to autism or Asperger's or synaesthesia... something. I've been noise-averse all my life. I simply can't tune it out.

We could form a club, but then we would have to listen to each other breathe.

[BooksPlease]

I know exactly what you mean and I'm the same about neighbour noise and always have been. As I type this our neighbours are out there loudly discussing extending their house by adding what I think sounds like a portaloo would you believe! If it's not that it's their grandchildren screaming and whining and being told off - very loudly. We went away and stayed in a cottage in the middle of nowhere - no neighbours at all, just sheep and tractor noise from the neighbouring fields, much more acceptable. We should move!