The Hum Nobody Else Can Hear
Why the fridge hum and crowded rooms bother you more.
It’s your granddaughter’s birthday and the whole family is crammed into the kitchen. The TV is going in the next room, two of the kids are shrieking over a balloon, the dishwasher kicks into its loud cycle, and someone keeps dragging a chair across the tile. You notice you’re gripping your coffee mug with both hands, counting the minutes until you can step out to the porch. Everyone else looks happy, and you’re the one who has to leave the room to breathe.
You’ve been called too sensitive since you were a girl, and difficult on the days you asked someone to turn it down, so you stopped asking and learned to white-knuckle your way through the noise.
There’s a 5-minute worksheet at the end of this newsletter called The Things You’ve Been Putting Up With. It walks through the sounds, textures, and rooms that wear you down without you noticing, so you can see how much you’re dealing with in a day instead of pushing through it and wondering why you’re worn out by dinner.
Why the hum won’t leave you alone
A sound or a feeling has to be strong enough before your brain notices it, and for most people that takes a lot, so the fridge hum, the tag in your collar, and the voices across the table are easy to ignore. For us it takes less. You notice the things other people tune out and keep noticing them all day, something researchers call sensory sensitivity, one of the most consistent things they find in ADHD.
This isn’t something that arrived with age, and it isn’t you getting fussier as you get older. You’ve been this way your whole life. It’s part of your ADHD, the same as everything else, and it doesn’t fade with age the way people assume it will.
What has changed over the years is how much you’ve had to push through. At work with the phones ringing, at home with the kids and the noise, you dealt with all of it and figured everyone else was dealing with the same thing.
