Aren't I Too Young for This?

I started university with tinnitus.

I have a hard time talking about my tinnitus, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out why. It’s not a tumour. It’s not a disease with a name people recognize and nod gravely at. It won’t end my life. So I learned to treat it like a houseguest who overstays — something to be polite about, not something to complain about. I’d open my mouth to describe it and then close it again, because what right did I have to be this bothered by a sound?

But it is a sound. All day, every day, since some point in 2021 I can no longer pinpoint exactly. It sounds like wind chimes and screaming happening at the same time — something almost pretty, layered directly over something that isn’t. There’s no off switch, no quiet room I can walk into where it isn’t there. It is, in the most literal sense, inescapable.

What surprised me most isn’t the sound itself — you adapt to a lot, eventually — it’s what it does to my attention. Focus is the first casualty. I’ll sit down to read a paragraph, or have a conversation, or just think a single thought through to its end, and there’s this competing layer of noise demanding a cut of my processing power that I never agreed to give up. Some days it’s background hum. Other days it’s the loudest thing in the room, louder than whoever’s actually talking to me.

I think the reason I’ve stayed quiet about it is that pain seems to need a permission slip. If it’s not dangerous, if no one can see it, if it doesn’t show up on a scan — does it count? I’ve decided, slowly and not without some resistance from the old houseguest-etiquette voice in my head, that it does. Something doesn’t have to be life-threatening to be exhausting. It doesn’t have to be visible to be real. Five years of a sound that never stops is, on its own terms, a lot to carry — and I don’t think I need a more serious diagnosis to justify saying so.

I don’t have a tidy resolution here. I haven’t beaten it, outsmarted it, or made peace with it in any complete way. Some days I manage it well — sound therapy, distraction, just deciding not to listen to it as hard. Other days it wins, and I lose an afternoon to a screeching wind chime no one else can hear.

What I do have is this: permission, finally, to say it’s hard. Not as a complaint demanding sympathy, just as a fact about my life that’s been true for five years and counting. If you’re carrying something similar — visible or not, dangerous or not — I hope you’ve already given yourself that same permission. If not, consider this me handing it to you.