During the years from 1984 to 1997 I suffered from the noise of small planes from a nearby airport. The worst were the ones that towed the gliders because it went on so long. I wrote this in my journal at the beginning of July 1995:
Downstairs making my second cup of tea, I found myself going off on a diatribe against the gliders — sparked by the piece in the Chamber of Commerce magazine: “soaring lifts your spirits”, “enjoy a place of spectacular peace and beauty” — and I want to yell at them “Soaring may lift your spirits, but the noise makes me want to kill myself” — “the spectacular peace is ruined by your exploitation of it” and in response to their imagined reply “NO I am not too sensitive — you are too noisy. How would you like to sit in the dentist chair and have a sensitive tooth drilled 10 or 20 times a day periodically throughout the summer? That’s what the noise feels like to me.” I hate them, and I don’t like hating them, I don’t like how it feels inside me when I hate. And I don’t know what to do about it. This sudden spurt of anger reminds me of my anger at Susan, and I wonder if they are connected. I also see that I am like my friend Eleanor, I want to kill myself because the planes are hurting me — it’s the exact same thing as what I get so upset with her for. And I think comes out of the same kind of invalidation — you’re too sensitive to live in this world, you’d be better off dead. Wanting to kill myself is a response to a sensitivity I can’t do anything about — well that’s not entirely true, all my efforts have lessened it, but they haven’t made it go away — and I think I’m wrong to be that sensitive. The sensitivity is bad enough, but it’s the invalidation of the sensitivity that makes me want to kill myself. At least I think so, but the two are so tangled up that it’s hard to separate them. I hear the sound and want to die, it seems direct to me, there doesn’t appear to be any self-invalidation in between. Well, of course, the planes themselves represent and re-stimulate the world’s invalidation. They are like that harsh edge that comes into mother’s voice when she’s drunk and when she has said particularly nasty things to me — in fact I wonder if it’s the same frequency? That would account for why it bothers me so much when other people seem to hardly notice it. And the planes are also saying, or rather snarling: “What’s the matter with you? You’re too sensitive. You have to learn to be tougher. We’re going to teach you a lesson.”
To which I respond: what’s the matter with me is that I am a very sensitive person who responds with great depth to the world around me. I am not “too sensitive”, the world is much too noisy and it’s bad for everyone’s health even though they don’t know it. I was abused as a child and the noise just re-stimulates it. I do not have to learn to be tougher — my sensitivity is part of what makes me an artist and it is my gift to the world. The world — by which I mean human beings — needs to learn to be gentler, or we are going to destroy ourselves with our own violence. And that whole attitude of “teach you a lesson” is a really shitty one and part of “poisonous pedagogy.” SO THERE! “I’m a natural resource & endangered species just like the Bald Eagle and the Whooping Crane and the Furbish Lousewort — and I deserve to be protected — I need to be protected if you are to survive and you’d jolly well better learn how to do it. And if you refuse to learn from me, then I hope you’re mugged or raped or assaulted or even murdered and you can see how you like “being taught a lesson” and whether it teaches you anything worthwhile.”
Phew! I hope that helps. I feel stronger & more solid in my middle.
It turns out that the sensitivity to noise is a symptom of PTSD. It was finally healed by a combination of medication and an astute therapist. I notice that expressing my anger helps me feel “stronger and more solid.”
It’s also true that I was a “Highly Sensitive Person,” and this made me even more sensitive to the noise.