The Insidiousness of Tinnitus

I'm 34 next month. 

For the past...oh let's call it...20 years or so I have been subjecting myself to pretty intense volumes of sound. It started when I was in military school: To escape the awful life I was living I would plant my head directly in front of the amplifier to which I had an electric guitar connected, and then I would just dose my face with obnoxiously loud power chords. 

This was my release. It was my way of decompressing, and at that age (15 or so) I thought it was fucking badass! Truth be told, it *was* fucking badass. It felt incredible. It was a huge rush that acted as a sort of reset button for my emotional condition. 

After high school/military school, I went on to college. This is when earbud headphones became my absolute best friend. I worked out a *lot* in college, and I don't think I ever entered the gym without my headphones in, blasting music into my ears at near-to-full volume. 

This particular habit was, I believe, an escape mechanism for not having to be social with other gym goers. I didn't (and still don't) like to be social when I work out. I am there for one thing - making myself better than I was the day before. I don't want to talk to anyone and I sure as hell don't want to listen to the grunting and hissing resounding throughout the weight area.

And then there was the mountain bike. I rode a mountain bike religiously throughout college, and as you might expect, I always did so with headphones in. Always the earbud style headphones, and always at near-to-full volume.

I needed to have a SOUNDTRACK to my life, you know? I needed to feel accompanied by the power of heavy metal and hip-hop at all possible times. In between classes, between meals, before bed, etc., etc.. It only stopped when I absolutely had to have a conversation with someone, listen to a lecture or if I had to sleep. 

After college I got into the corporate world and started doing sales work. Sure, the biking time was less, but the gym time wasn't. Oh, and in between sales calls, in my car, what do you think was going on? That's right - insanely loud music. Everywhere I went. I invested in super high fidelity speakers and expensive amplifiers to ensure that my eardrums were being sufficiently pelted with the maximum possible amount of decibels. 

I was also a fan of concerts. Loud ones. I had to be up front, as close to the speaker cabinets as possible. If my ears weren't ringing after a concert, I obviously didn't have a good enough time. 

This went on for years. Finally, about when I turned 30, I stopped doing the concert thing because it was just not as empowering as it used to be. I didn't really get off on moshing and getting loud and sweaty with a bunch of other twenty-somethings. Plus I wasn't as angry anymore. I still had an ongoing love affair with my headphones, however.

At about the same time, I started playing guitar on the street. Just for fun. I would pick an alley or some other place with good acoustics, set up my small amplifier and just play music for hours. Sometimes without stopping. Always without caring about how loud it really was. This is something I have done consistently, every single weekend for the past 4-5 years.

Let's skip forward to about 3 months ago. I'm sitting around, playing PC games, when I distinctly notice that I can actually *hear* the high-pitched whining of the machinery in my computer. Crazy! My hearing is like, so good, right? I can hear even the highest pitch sounds. I'm so gifted.

Right.

I turned off the computer. The sound remained. 

I didn't think much of it. Maybe there was some other equipment in my condo that was making a high-pitched whine. Perhaps the AC unit. Furnace? Other electronics?

I forgot all about it until the next week when I was falling asleep one evening, I found that I could actually hear what sounded like morse code coming into my ears. This was in addition to the omnipresent high-pitched computer type of whine. It was incredibly faint, but definitely there.

It was at about this time that I started to panic a little bit. My father had told me about his own Tinnitus and, nearing 70 years old himself, I viewed it as just a part of him getting on in age. Since my slow realization that I have Tinnitus, the problem has only worsened. It is now to the point where the ringing in my head (mind you, it's in my HEAD, not my ears. This is sometimes called 'global' Tinnitus.) is 24/7 and quite extreme.

It is exacerbated by loud eruptions of sound, like dropping a cake pan or slamming a door. Sometimes I can't fall asleep at all and I end up having to turn on some sort of white noise generator just to ease into sleep. This affliction has slowly become a certainly maddening aspect of my every waking moment. 

There is now no escape save for...ironically...music. Listening to music takes my minds focus away from the Tinnitus and allows me to forget about it for a time. But it is in fact only for a time, because as soon as external sound leaves my earshot, the Tinnitus is right there to remind me of my foolish decisions as a younger man.

I really don't know how bad this is going to get or how I'm going to manage to live the rest of my life with it. From the research I have done, it appears that once you have hearing damage like this, the problem never gets better. You can only learn to live with it through things like habituation and ear training exercises that help you to disassociate the sound.

What makes this particularly difficult for me is that I like to spend a lot of my time alone. Oftentimes I prefer silence to sound and meditation to activity. Now, things like silence and meditation are too much to ask for. Neither can exist anymore in their true forms, because the Tinnitus is always there. And, some times it's far worse than others. 

The second factor making this especially difficult is that I am predisposed to anxiety and depression. I have been this way all my life, and it doesn't take much to send me into a depressive episode. Knowing that I have an incurable hearing disability now has already prompted very intense and very dark feelings about my life and my future. It's very dire.

I have always used this blog as a way to communicate my feelings and to be creative for an unknown audience of whomever happens to stumble upon my tiny corner of the internet. Now, I am using this blog as a journal. I'm not writing this post to anyone in particular...I'm simply expressing my situation for the sheer purpose of expression itself. 

I'm not trying to sell Tinnitus relief pills. I'm not appealing for medical advice. I'm certainly not trying to monetize what I write and I'm definitely not interested in crowdsourcing donations for therapy. I just want there to be some record of my struggles with life after I'm gone, so that people may look back at all this and gain some understanding as to where my head was when I was alive. 

And where is my head right now? Well...let's just say my head is...

...ringing.