I’ve got problems.
I don’t suppose it will come as any sort of surprise to my audience that I’ve got problems; I have spent a goodly chunk of the last few months chronicling my struggles with depression.
They don’t stop with my mental health issues, though.
I’ve got an absolutely foul temper. You know the caricature of the hot headed Irishmen, with a short fuse and always ready to blow? Yeah, that’s me. I go through life millimeters from the edge of a temper tantrum of thermonuclear proportions.
I have very little patience. There are people who don’t suffer fools gladly, and those who don’t suffer them at all. I’m somewhere along that spectrum, closer to the “at all” end than the “not gladly” end.
I am socially anxious. I don’t very much like large groups of people and one of the unfortunate consequences of the lockdowns has been a return to my naturally reclusive nature.
I try to speak very precisely, yet I will say completely innocuous and impersonal, and people get offended by it. When I explain to them it was innocuous and impersonal, that I meant exactly the words I spoke and not some hidden meaning, they just get more offended, and I. JUST. DON’T. GET. IT.
I’m very poor at reading people’s reactions. I think it has to do with an engineer’s mindset, but it doesn’t matter so much why it is, as that it is. I can be upsetting someone without having any idea I’m doing so.
I have severe misophonia. Don’t know what that is?
Misophonia is a condition where a person has a severe sensitivity to specific soft sounds and visual images.
One colloquial term for it is sound rage. Short version, listening to your open mouthed cud chewing makes me want to punch you in the face. And the sounds which trigger my misophonia are not confined to your disgusting table manners. So stop
- snapping your fingers
- cracking your knuckles
- chewing gum
- snapping gum
- in fact, do like Singapore did and make gum illegal, it’s gross and has no place in civilized society
- slurping your tea/coffee
- sucking the straw to get that last drop out of the can
- doing that weird “pop the baby carrot between your teeth with your mouth open” thing that pompous gits have to do to show how healthy their snacks are, just eat the fucking thing
- eating in meetings
- opening pop cans
I could go on all day. And there goes my temper again.
I’m a work in progress.
Yes, I’ve got problems, and I’m a work in progress. Thing is, with the exception of my misophonia, these are all things that I can work on. I can work on my stress, I can meditate and breathe, I can apply similar solutions to all of them so the world doesn’t have to suffer from my problems.
You know what? Piss on the world. I can apply the solutions so my family doesn’t have to suffer from my problems.
