remetheus

There's a ringing in my ears and it's been there forever.

I don't remember when it started. I remember when I got my first hint, turning off the TV and commenting on how I could still hear "electrical noise" from it. But only I could hear it. My family thought it was yet another way I was crazy.

I went to bed that night and like every other night I couldn't get to sleep because of the army of crickets outside my window. Except my bedroom was on the second storey. The window was right above the garage and I could clearly see there weren't crickets on it. There never were.

My memories were always patchy, but I clearly recalled staying awake until early morning every night waiting desperately to be tired enough to fall asleep since the early years of school. I remembered insisting to mum that I couldn't sleep no matter how hard I tried so I wanted to stay up longer so I'd tire out faster and not go crazy with boredom.

She said no.

And she made sure to fully close my bedroom door from then on, thinking noise from the TV was keeping me up. It just let the crickets be even louder with nothing to distract me from them. Hours of exhaustion every night, watching faint colours swirl in the darkness as my mind struggled with the lack of sensory input by creating phantom visuals to accompany the ceaseless cricket chorus.

Followed by waking up with no memory of falling asleep, only hours of tormented thoughts. A strict 8:30 bedtime, finally passing out at 2, maybe 3 AM, and being woken up at 7:30 AM. Did mum really think I was sleeping 11 hours to still be exhausted in the morning and all through every single day?

I didn't connect all this on that night after the TV incident in reality. I was simply too tired. By that time I had a radio in my room that I put on as quietly as I could, resting my head right next to it to have something else in my ears alongside the crickets. It didn't help me get to sleep but it did help me feel a little less tormented.

Keep going forward a little more and I get handed down a crappy old TV (my sister was given a brand new one for her bedroom around the same time of course) which meant I could bring my PS1 into my room. I had saved birthday and Christmas money and worked odd jobs to afford that a couple of years after it was released (my sister received a brand new PS2 as just one of several presents around that time, the year it launched, of course and I was not allowed to touch it, I even got scolded once when she handed me the controller). But now I could play video games all night so long as I kept the volume down. I was still dogshit tired every day but I was happy, free to immerse myself in escapist (Final) Fantasy when the world was no longer making demands I could do nothing for.

I didn't always play video games. Sometimes I would watch TV. Late Night SBS in the '90s had a lot of eye-opening stuff, for starters. Sometimes I would tune to a channel that doesn't exist and use the static as a light to read by. The crickets had a lot of trouble going up against static noise.

It would be years before I would put it together, after being shoved out with all my things into the cramped front half of a shed, after being left behind to be sent to a homeless shelter when mum moved out without warning me. I would tell someone about the funny noise I would hear when a TV turned off. They suggested I might have tinnitus.

That was a word I knew! I knew what it meant! Why had I never thought that could be me? Same reason I never thought of myself as trans despite desperately crying about how I wasn't a girl so many of those sleepless nights, I suppose. Same reason I didn't suggest I might have ADHD to any of the teachers, counsellors, therapists, friends and family members who interrogated me about my inability to function despite knowing that I was incapable of paying attention to anything that I was supposed to.

"I'm not allowed to have problems, I just am a problem."

I don't think that's how anyone ever wanted me to feel. That's just how I was shaped by experience to feel about myself through the collective pressure in my life on the fragile, constantly exhausted jumble of pained thoughts and feelings I call a self.

I really do believe mum thought she was doing what was best for me in all of these moments. Even when she abandoned me. I couldn't explain anything about my problems and she had a limited imagination and an even more limited budget. (Thanks for all the years of drastically underpaying alimony and child support, dad.) She told me later she thought it would "shock" me into action, motivate me to try to make something of myself. It didn't feel like a lie. It was completely wrong, crushed me even further, made me feel all the more worthless and incapable. But she believed it.

Years later I'd learn about the bootstrap myth and understand how Capitalism ruins the morality of people who don't know enough to question the propaganda it spreads.

I don't know where my tinnitus came from. I don't know how to treat it. That thing where you cup your ears and tap your neck? Barely does anything for me. The only thing that works against it is distraction and other noise, and I can't take listening to stuff constantly. I have painfully sensitive ears.

And there's a ringing in my ears, it'll be there forever.