Grief at losing something I hated

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 noticed it first in the supermarket, of all places, standing in an aisle that had always been difficult and finding it was simply an aisle.

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.

The quiet was the thing I was least prepared for. I had spent thirty years with a background hum and had no idea it was not how everybody's head sounded.

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.

Somebody in this circle described it as the volume going down rather than the station changing, and that was the most accurate description I have read.

This is the honest version, and the honest version is harder to write.

I cried the first week. Not from relief exactly. From something closer to grief for how much effort I had been spending without knowing it.

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

Coming back to what Thea wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

What I would tell somebody experiencing this for the first time is that whatever it brings up is allowed, including the things that do not look like gratitude.

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.

The space it left was uncomfortable at first. I had a great deal of attention suddenly free and no idea what to do with it.