I did not know other people did not have this

Something I did not expect: I was less irritable within a fortnight, and I now think a good deal of my irritability had been the constant background negotiation.

I had never described it to anybody before this circle because I had assumed it was universal. Finding out it was not was a strange afternoon.

I did not realise how much of my planning had been about this until it stopped. Entire structures in my week turned out to exist for a reason that had gone.

I walked past a shop I had never once walked past in my adult life and stood outside it slightly stunned. That is my whole story about this.

Mine went quiet within about ten days and I did not trust it for months. I kept waiting for it to come back and prove the whole thing had been my imagination.

Nothing to add except that I am glad this thread exists.

I would gently say that if the quiet has left you with a lot of unexpected feeling, that is very common here and it is worth saying out loud.

Not a solution, just company.

What was underneath the noise turned out to be the actual subject. Once it stopped I had to look at what it had been covering, and that took a year.

Coming back two years on to say the quiet held, that the adjustment was real, and that I would not go back to how my head sounded before.

Somebody asked me whether I miss it, which sounds like an absurd question and is not. There was a familiarity to it that I have had to let go of.

Izzy — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

I keep a note from my first month about what it had been like before, because I could already feel the memory of it fading and I did not want to lose it.

My version was gradual rather than sudden. Nothing dramatic, just a slow noticing over about two months that something had stopped.

What helped was writing down what the noise had actually been, while I could still remember it clearly. Six months later the memory of it had gone soft.