I've always had good hearing. When I was younger my mom took me to an audiologist to get it tested for some reason or other, and I can still remember him telling her that it's actually better than average. But about a year ago it just seemed to get even better, and suddenly I was hearing people chew on the other side of the room. It wasn't so bad at first, but something happened and the sound of people chewing or swallowing started making me feel inexplicably angry and I couldn't control it and I often ended up lashing out because of it. My parents used to get irritated with me because of this, and I can understand why, but, once again, I couldn't control how the sounds made me feel.

Then I discovered what it is that I suffer from: Misophonia. The long and short of it is that it's a sound sensitivity syndrome, usually associated with repetitive sounds. It causes the sufferer to have a sort of fight or flight reaction, and there is no cure. It often leads to social anxiety as well.

I usually have it pretty well under control, but exam time just manages to shove that control right out the window. There's always someone with a sniffle, or someone that's just incredibly bored. Unfortunately, today was one of the days where boredom came into play and one of the boys decided to do this suck-y thing with his hands that had me wanting to claw out my own ears. And, because that's just how it seems to be with boys, another one joined in. This carried on for the last ten minutes of the exam session, and by the fifth minute I was just about ready to take my calculator and hit them over the heads with it. But I managed to suck it up and keep my cool, and I made it out alive and free of assault charges.

However, the whole ordeal just seemed to latch on to me the whole day and just hasn't let go. My triggers just seem to be really bad today, which of course resulted in me having a really nasty mood and a short temper, which also resulted in me snapping at my mom because of the way she was drinking. My mom's pretty great in the whole, "I acknowledge you legitimately suffer from this," front, but just because she acknowledges it doesn't mean she goes out of her way to avoid it. So, after giving her the look that basically translates to, "You're chewing/drinking too loud, please stop," I turned back to what I was doing and... she does it again. She made a whole big joke out of my reaction to her drinking, until I finally told her off and got the hell out of the room as fast as I could. This was not the first time she had done it, and it certainly won't be the last. (The worst was probably a few months ago where she came and deliberately chewed right next to my ear. God, I can't even begin to explain the distress I felt at that, I was still hearing it a long time after she left, and it basically left me as a sobbing mess because no matter how loud I turned my music, it wouldn't drown the sound out.)

So now I'm sitting in my room, wondering how I'm going to cope with tomorrow if today was this bad.