Slow
CW: disability, oversharing, using gifs to distract from charged emotional revelations
At some very early point in my life, I was trained that speed was of the essence. It wasn’t enough to just get the right answer, but to get it as quickly as possible. The whole world was a quiz show, and to the fastest went the spoils.
I actually was on the high school quiz bowl team. We called it Academic League, and I treated it like the Major Leagues. I approached each question like a runner at the starting line or a diver on the platform, every nerve ending poised, quieting every single other thing from my awareness so I could hear the question instantaneously. It was a race course where the sound waves of the question hit my ear, got translated into a signal that hit my brain, generated the correct response, and sent the nerve impulse to my hand to buzz in with the answer. Every millisecond counted.
Also I’m from the New York suburbs, raised in a Jewish-American community that prized knowledge and employed what I’ve since learned is called “high-involvement cooperative overlapping” — meaning, interrupting a lot. You had to think fast and talk faster if you wanted to get a word in edgewise.
I excelled in school. Early on, I was placed in the “Gifted and Talented Programs.” (Nobody every used the term ADHD back then. I didn’t think of myself as disruptive. Although perhaps if you asked to folks who I went to elementary school with, they’d have a different story.) I was a great student, and I didn’t really have to try all that hard either. The system worked well for me — and I worked well in the system.
Except for one part — that whole pesky social angle. I didn’t have a lot of friends. Some of the ones I did have weren’t the kindest kids. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the people I thought liked me were sometimes quite cruel. But from everything I was told it was just how kids normally acted, and things would get better when I grew up. Because of the vagaries of district zoning, most of the kids I went to elementary school and junior high were sent to a different high school, and in 10th grade I found myself in school with a whole new group of strangers.
It was a very lonely time, and I never really found a core group of friends I felt like I fit in with. I instead drifted between groups, able to interact on a surface level with many while being close to few. There was this constant, nagging feeling that there was a conversation going on that I wasn’t a part of, that I was being excluded from. I figured that was just teenage angst and one day, I’d graduate and go off to college and then real life would begin.
Except real life never really got much different. And while I’ve had some great friendships and meaningful relationships, there were also months and years where I didn’t really talk to anybody, at least on anything more than a surface level. As I got older, I got better at pretending everything was fine. But it never really went away, that feeling of missing out on some hidden layer of conversation happening around me.
For someone who was inculcated with the idea that he was smart and quick, it was maddening. There had to be something I was missing, some technique or practice or medication or mindset that would help me figure it out. The amount of time and effort I’ve spent trying to figure out what I’ve been doing wrong….I can’t even begin to calculate. Some years have been good, others have not been. A life, like any other in our pre-apocalyptic capitalist anthropocene. But underneath it all still lurked that sense. That I’m missing something. That in a room full of people who are all my friends, some level of engagement and interaction is escaping me. I’m on the outskirts of some conversation. I could sense its outline from its absence.
I got used to it. I didn’t have any way to know differently. But then a few things happened…
The first thing was that about six years ago, after decades of shitty therapists, I started working with a great one. One of the things she’s helped me discover is that my prime method of coping is dissociation. After all, the easiest way to avoid a problem is to not be able to even see it.
With her help and a lot of work, I’ve been slowly learning how to dissociate less, and how to stay present to the sensations that I experience. Without that, I don’t think I’d be able to see any of what came next.
About two years ago I began to notice something weird. Every once in a while, when talking with someone I would hear that they spoke but the content didn’t make any sense. The sounds were garbled. Then, a few milliseconds later, I would feel their words snap into place, and I would understand them. I could actually feel this short delay between listening and understanding, and it was unnerving. I wondered if it was a symptom of early-onset Alzheimers. I was too afraid to google it.
Earlier this year I went to an immersive show, of the kind I so ardently profess a love for and yet actually attend rarely. In this show, we were given a puzzle to unravel and while trying to do so, an actor delivered a monologue. As the actor spoke, the came closer and closer and they spoke louder and louder. At a certain point, they got very close to me and spoke very loudly — and I felt my brain shut off. Like a switch had been flipped, and I had to abandon the task and walk away. I could actually observe the sensation of my mind closing down.
Then over the summer, I went to another immersive show, one that I’d been looking forward to for a long time. And I had a wretched experience, mainly due to how noisy the space was. It was so oppressively loud that I had an instantaneous physical reaction to it, and my fight-or-flight reflexes kicked in. It was horrible.
But after my nervous system calmed back down, I was able to connect the two experiences and wonder if there was something going on with my hearing. I made an appointment to see an audiologist. In the initial consultation, I told her about the above experiences and she asked me questions about my hearing. When she was done, she said that she would definitely perform a whole battery of tests but that she was pretty sure she knew what they would show.
And that’s how I learned that I have Auditory Processing Disorder.
APD is an issue not with hearing, but with the decoding of auditory information. The problem issue exists not between the outside world and the ear, but between the ear and the brain.
Sure enough when we did the tests, they showed exactly what she expected. My hearing is fine and tests within the normal range. But somewhere in between the ear encoding sound waves into data and the brain decoding their meaning, things go awry. There are several different kinds of APD, but mine manifests in a few specific ways:
Hyperacusis is sensitivity to loud noises. In loud environments, I can have a PTSD-like reaction. If stuck in a loud place over a long period of time, my nervous system will begin to shut down and withdraw. (This is called “overstimulation,” similar to what people on the autism spectrum experience.) These two things are what caused my adverse reactions at those shows.
I have tremendous difficulty picking out conversations in a crowded room, something audiologists test for called “Speech-in-Noise” and a condition which is beginning to be called “Hidden Hearing Loss.”
These situations are made markedly worse by Cognitive Fatigue. During one Speech-In-Noise test that lasted for a long time, the doctor told me that three-quarters of the way through the test she saw my “entire personality shift and close down.” And while we didn’t find the tests results to show it, it’s her theory that those instances of delay in recognizing words are more noticeable the more fatigued my mind is.
Put all of these together, and it means that social situations with lots of people and loud noise or music are places where its going to be difficult for me to hear well. But there was one more thing I learned, and it’s been an earthquake.
One subtype of APD is called “Prosodic Deficit.” It can also be described as “Receptive Aprosodia.” This is a problem in decoding spoken language for shades of meaning, leading to missing proper tone and intent. People with Prodosic Deficit often feel like they’re being made fun of when they’re not, or read anger or sarcasm in people’s words when they’re not there.
Or, y’know, feel like there’s a level of conversation going on around them that they’re constantly misinterpreting or misunderstanding.
Oh, fuck.
So it turns out that I was not paranoid and I was not crazy. You have all been having conversations with shades of tone and meaning that I have been missing.
It would appear that this is something that I have always had. And that the emphasis on speed that I learned at an early age has been serving as a crutch and a compensation all of this time. That while I’ve put so much energy and emphasis into the speed of knowing and the speed of reacting, it turns out that there’s been a slowdown in the system the entire time. It turns out that what I need is to not go faster faster faster all the time, but allow myself to go slower, to take the extra time to process.
It’s not an exaggeration that this is rewriting my understanding of my entire life. I wonder how many relationships I’ve had where I missed an essential layer of meaning or intent. I wonder about people that I’ve hurt or let down, because I thought they were saying something other than what they were. I wonder about all the energy I spent trying to solve the wrong problems. I wonder about what would have been different if I’d figure this out years ago. If I had to guess, I’m in a grief phase. Or maybe sharing this is part of coming out of that phase.
I have no idea where this will lead. I’m sure I will learn a lot more. But while I figure this out, please bear with me. Especially if you say something to me and I misunderstand it. I’m trying to process it.
