Jay Furr's Dreamwidth Blog

After all these years, I have an explanation for why I absolutely can’t stand listening to someone eat an apple.

It’s misophonia — and apparently the loathing of hearing someone eat an apple is one of the most common expressions of the syndrome.

Not all crunching sounds drive me up a wall. There’s just something about the crunch and rasp of an apple being eaten that that makes me want to run away, scream, etcetera. With every bite, I have a corresponding flinch and grimace. Or at least I used to — I’ve gotten much better about keeping the distress on the inside and not showing it.

In any event, apparently I’m one of the last people on the planet to have encountered this concept… There’re GAZILLIONS of articles on the Web on the subject.

For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-46193709

Fortunately, I have it at a mild level. There are people who fly into a rage when they are forced to hear certain sounds. The pain is just that severe.

Apples are definitely my bête noire, but are by no means the only thing that gets on my nerves. I hate being stuck in a roomful of people eating too. Especially if it’s a confined conference room or other otherwise quiet space — there’s nothing to mask or drown out all the slurping and chomping and gulping and rustling of wrappers and everything else that goes along with it.

I just about always skip lunch when I’m working; I’m often onsite at a corporate office and I typically just keep on working during a lunch break during a day-long meeting. If the people I am meeting with go somewhere else to eat, I’m happy. If they bring the food back to the room I’m in, I am, um, on edge.

The sound of a bunch of people who went out and brought lunch back and are smacking and slurping and chewing through it drives me up a wall. I sit there with a blank half-smile on my face, evidently without a care in the world… but if I can find an excuse to go run an errand or go to another room and “check messages” or something, I do. I don’t mind eating in a restaurant where there’s enough background noise that I’m not forced to listen to every munch, crunch, slobber and slurp. It’s not bad when it’s just me and Carole either. What makes the Conference Room Lunch Break Torture so horrible is that there’s absolutely nothing to drown it out; conference rooms are quiet places and so for the half hour or so it takes to get people fed you basically hear nothing BUT

SLURRRRRRP

CHOMP CHOMP

CRUNNNNCH

SLURRRRRRRP

rustle rustle of sandwich wrapper

lather rinse repeat

Again… I can control my outward reaction. I don’t sit there shaking with rage or anything. But inside, behind the cool, relaxed exterior, there’s a Jay that’s going “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.” 🙂

My brain lies to me all the time.

Right now there is nothing wrong with my life. Everything’s okay. Work is fine. I’m not over my head in debt. The weather’s fine. I need to lose about 40 pounds (okay, that’s one major dissatisfier), but otherwise I’m not in desperately poor health or anything. To the best of my knowledge my wife isn’t planning on leaving me any time soon. Things are actually pretty good.

But I feel mentally awful.

Imagine that you can’t stop worrying about your overdrawn bank account and about all the credit cards you owe money on. But then imagine that you’re NOT overdrawn and your credit cards have zero balances. But you can’t stop worrying. Even if you log in and look at your balances in the bank and on the Chase and AmEx websites and see that everything is just fine, moments later you go back to fretting about how you’re going to make ends meet.

That’s kind of what my brain has been doing to me lately.

I know I’m depressed. I know that my brain is lying to me. But that doesn’t help me deal with the malaise and the angst. I can remind myself every five seconds that everything’s okay. I can soldier on rather than crawling into bed and pulling the covers over my head. Yes, I can get by.

You ask: are you taking antidepressants? Yes, I’m taking antidepressants. Perhaps it’s time, in theory, to revisit which ones I’m taking. But right now my MD and I are playing a balancing game with my high blood pressure meds and we really don’t want to screw around with multiple things at the same time.

You ask: am I seeing a therapist or counselor? No, I am not seeing a counselor routinely. There are people that talk therapy simply doesn’t help. I’m one of them. (If you have the urge to hit the ‘reply’ button and tell me I’m wrong, spare me. Five minutes’ Googling on “talk therapy clinical trials’ or ‘talk therapy doesn’t always help’ will show you that I’m not talking out of my hat. If you want to seriously cheese me off, tell me that my depression is due to my not seeing a therapist regularly.) I am acutely aware that the feelings I’m experiencing are not based on actual life experience. I am aware that my brain is like a computer pre-programmed to see every glass as half empty. Knowing that your bathroom mirror has been replaced by one out of a funhouse arcade doesn’t automatically help you see yourself clearly.

And for what it’s worth, I’m a former board member of the Vermont affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. I’m not an uninformed goober who prefers to curse the darkness rather than light a candle.

I think the one thing that would probably help is “getting a lot more exercise”. Sweat the crazy out, as it were. But there’s the rub: my brain is very very very good at saying “Tomorrow.”

I hate my brain.

I apologize to everyone for being a tiresomely annoying, self-centered, whiny, attention-whoring, angry, malicious jerk.

I wish I could make amends to everyone I’ve harmed.

Since I can’t, I am planning on more-or-less permanently deactivating all my social media accounts.

If, in the short term, you would like a personal apology, let me know. It’s always hard to know if a personal attempt at amends will actually make things worse, and that’s the last thing I want to do.