Published on 12, July, 2020
I am most comfortable with complete silence.
I wonder if this is the autism at play?
When I was growing up our house was always noisy and I think I was traumatised by it.
There were no quiet refuges - I even shared a bedroom until I left home.
My mum had to have sound on all the time. I believe she was autistic but I think she had an under sensitivity to noise, which I'm pretty sure I've read can also be an autism thing.
Then I had a series of shared flats, which were noisy, then bedsits until I purchased a quiet flat in my 30s.
Then I lived in a nice Victorian house on my own which still had some noise, as it was on a busy road in Portsmouth and terraced.
Nowadays I am lucky.
The last 15 years I have lived in a very quiet detached house where once the windows are closed there is no outside (or inside often) noise at all.
My husband is a quiet person + spends a lot of time in his studio outside.
It's taken me a long time to get to this quiet place in my life - I am now 61.
How do you respond to noise/silence?
I seek complete silence the vast majority of the time.
I use noise cancelling headphones to try and block out external noise and create silence, rather than to listen to music or other audio.
I rarely listen to music nowadays. In my twenties I used to listen a lot more and could tolerate it in the background while I was studying. Now if I do listen to music it has to be the complete focus of my attention, rather than background noise.
However when I am trying to get to sleep in silence I can hear the internal sounds of my own body, which keeps me awake. If I listen to a podcast or video it distracts me from those enough to fall asleep.
I have always lived in densely packed terraced housing, but have never been able to get accustomed to the noise that comes with that. As I get older I seem to be increasingly intolerant of noise from neighbours.
The place where you live sounds idyllic. My dream is a detached country cottage with the only sounds being from nature