It was a Good Day: The Sounds were Precise and Overwhelming

I'm the first one on the left (this was 20 years ago)! Not a picture of the events below, but a similar setting.

 Intro

I’m torn between telling the story in my heart and the story brewing in my head. 

When the smoke settles, you can decide for yourself.

Is this story A or story B?

I can hear you talking from a distance because I’m always on alert.

Put me in a full room of people talking at the same time and I hear noise.

It’s not a hearing thing, it’s a sensory thing.

I’ll illustrate this in an experience that goes from a meeting to a meal.

Precise concentration turned upside down.

Story

I’m torn between telling the story in my heart and the story brewing in my head. One of the invisible challenges I live with has to do with sound intake. I don’t know if this is a physical condition or a trauma response. I’m not trying to answer that here, however, one side of it works as a skill at work and the other works as a challenge. Recently, I experienced both the strength and challenge within an half hour of one another. 

I can hear you talking from a distance because I’m always on alert. At work this means I can address questions or recognize situations without breaking my concentration on what I’m working on. This serves me well on a daily basis because I work in a constantly pivoting environment. The upside of that alert state is awareness. The downside to that alertness is when it turns from clarity to overload. 

I was in a meeting with a large group of people and there was the main conversation and then people’s sidebar conversations. At one point the main conversation focused on some of my past work and I was fully engaged in that conversation. Simultaneously, I heard one of the sidebar conversations talking about something I had firsthand knowledge and experience of, but I knew it wasn’t my place to respond. Sometimes when I hear things that I hear from a distance, I have to decide if I should acknowledge what I heard or not. I let context dictate that. 

When you take that alertness and put me in a full room of people talking at the same time and I hear noise. After the aforementioned meeting where I was absorbing two conversations at once, we had a group meal. With a large group of people having multiple conversations, I could barely hear the person sitting next to me. This happens because my constant alertness has been overwhelmed by the sheer number of inputs happening at the same time.

It’s not a hearing thing, it’s a sensory thing. It’s not my aim to listen to other people in the environments I’m in unless I’m having a conversation with someone. I work in an environment where I can see most of my surroundings beyond my immediate workspace. Sometimes that alertness isn’t about what I hear, it’s about what I observe. I’ve been sidetracked from multiple conversations at my desk by something I see in the surrounding environment. I usually acknowledge this when I’m meeting with someone because I feel bad for the distraction. On the other hand, this works well for customer service. I routinely stop talking to team members to acknowledge or assist someone. It’s essentially the same as the sound alertness. 

Put me back into that multi-sensory experience of a meal and that precise concentration was turned upside down. I had to tell the person sitting next to me this story because I could barely hear them. This happens with sound, space, and sight in busy environments. I’m absorbing the audible, visual, and spatial noise in the environment. I was trying to find something at the beach on the Fourth of July and there were so many people and visuals that I had to give up and leave. I was playing Among Us with my kids and they lamented that I didn’t move a lot and it’s because there were so many obstacles in the space that it was safer to sit still.

This isn’t about any specific setting or people. When these sensory responses happen, it’s not personal. "Ain' t nothin’ to it [my senses] made me do it” (Ice Cube, “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It”). Sometimes I have to bury myself under headphones and listen to tunes and beats to quiet these sensory responses. On a good day, the volume is low and one ear is open. On a bad day, I turn up the volume. As I wrote this the volume was loud while I unearthed some Ice Cube tracks. On the day of the meeting and the meal I talked about earlier, I was just thinking, “I can't believe today was a good day” (Ice Cube, “It was a Good Day”).