This is how it affects me:
I feel pressed by the silence at times. It's like air that just keeps getting denser and denser, pushing against my eardrums, against my chest till I can't seem to make a sound myself. And if I do manage it, the sound is usually alien to me. Out of space, out of time. Neither here nor there.
I realise that when I spend the day home alone, my internal volume goes up a few notches. The voices in my head, the music in my head and the white noise in my head becomes so much louder than anything else. Sometimes, I get so used to my internal sound that I forget how silent my day really is. I don't need to turn the radio on because I already have music in my head. I don't know what music it is but I know it's there. I cannot make it out yet I know it's there.
In moments such as these, silence is not really silence.
When I'm suddenly yanked back into reality, when external sounds start cropping up around me - external voices, external music, external white noise - I feel assaulted. These sounds pound on my ear drums. I cringe at the volume, no matter how soft it is because external sounds are so much louder than my internal volume can ever be. I get so annoyed and irked by these external sounds.
I mean, yes, I am happy to hear sounds of the real world, but after such a long day in silence, noise can be quite stressful (even if I did kind of hate the silence). It's like I've grown used to the silence, much like when you get used to having cracked lips - it hurts but you know, after some time, to avoid spicy food. You live around this. In that way, I live around silence; until noise becomes the thing that irks me.
That's what silence is when I'm alone.
On another note, I'm currently reading "Eat, Pray, Love". I think it's a beautiful book. I've learned a lot from it. No, not every lesson the author learnt applies to me, but some things do. My favourite so far, is this: Live in the present. I think that's what we've all lost. The ability to live in the present. Sometimes, I think the human race has lost this ability so long ago that babies are now born without it. They don't lose it, they just never had it to begin with.
We're constantly planning ahead, working today for money tomorrow. Our thoughts are basically, 'Oh, one day, I'm gonna be/do _____. One day...." either that or we're dwelling on the past. "Ergh, last night was terrible," "I wish I had done that differently...." You get the picture.
That's really all we ever do. We relive the past and dream of the future. What about today? What about here and now? What about the present? Do we really want to spend our present dwelling on "what if's"?
What we all need to remember is how to live in the present. We need to live today for today and enjoy the moments in the present. What we need to recapture is the ability to worry about "tomorrow" only when "tomorrow" becomes "today". I really believe that if we put our entire soul into living each day in the present, then the future will sort itself out.
Scary, isn't it, this whole concept of 'not worrying about the future'? It is to me, but I think it's necessary. If we want to really be at peace, we should be at peace with our present because the past cannot be changed and the future has yet to happen, so what is there to worry about.
Anyways, this is me today. Just thinking. Always thinking :)
I want to end with this. I found this video that demonstrates to you what schizophrenic people hear when they have auditory hallucinations. This is based on real life accounts. I have to warn you, it's not for the faint hearted. This is very creepy and I cannot even begin to comprehend how they live like this. I stopped after 18 seconds (the entire thing is 3 minutes and 38 seconds long), literally yanking out the headphone and hitting the mute button. But I hope you try, even just for a bit. I am very glad that my inner voices sound nothing like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment