It’s a tough time to have a cause.
With everyone busy ripping down statues, erasing America’s past, and paving the road for communism, gay pride and misophonia have gotten lost in the shuffle.
Gay pride takes a greater hit because of the black community’s general lack of support for the alphabet soup community. With all of the destruction of urban black communities work that needs to be done, the Black Lives Matter movement simply doesn’t have time to raise a rainbow flag.
And of the three groups, misophonia survivors are truly the underserved, underrepresented minority community.
Misophonia sufferers experience negative emotions, thoughts, or physical rage triggered by specific, outstanding noises. According to WebMD, sound can trigger “a desire to kill or stop whatever is making the noise.”
What none of the articles I’ve seen online addresses is the specificity of the rage that accompanies the disease. It’s not just a raw, unidentifiable hatred of sound.
When you have misophonia, you quickly identify repetitive, staccato-like sounds that don’t belong. As soon as you hear them, you have to know where they’re coming from. And if the sound is coming from someone doing something irritating, it’s easy to experience rage: Not just because of the sound itself, but because of the selfishness, and lack of awareness and courtesy the person making the noise is exhibiting.
Alas, as we declared on June 22, 2018, today is the day we’ve chosen for National Misophonia Awareness Day, and so we take this time to call attention to those people out there who, through no fault of their own, suffer with a malady that makes it unbearably to listen to all of the clinking and sipping that goes on from coworkers who can’t be bothered to eat breakfast at home, before they arrive at work.
In some ways, coronavirus has been a blessing for misophonia survivors because they can work from home, in a somewhat more controlled environment. However, even then, they’re still subjected to the barking of a irresponsible pet owner’s dog and the constant hum of drills and saws from the neighborhood’s never-ending home projects.
As we all fall all over ourselves to protest people who largely agree, let’s be sure to take at least a moment to quiet down, and show respect for misophonia survivors.
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