I’ve always hated the sounds of chewing, slurping and snorting – but now I know I’m not alone | Imbi Neeme

If we ever had dinner together, I probably wanted to kill you.

Before you contact the authorities, let me explain: I am not a serial killer. I suffer from a condition called misophonia, in which small sounds such as eating, sniffing or clicking trigger an extreme response that – to me at least – feels like a thousand tiny needles poking into my brain.

I grew up in a time when misophonia didn’t have a name. As I sat at the end of the dining room table with my finger firmly in one ear, it was a quirk of my personality – an odd trait to add to a long list of other odd traits, such as a deep aversion to people walking on carpet while wearing rubber thongs and an aversion to synthetic material against the soles of my feet.

For years I kept my not-quite-right brain a secret from the world, ashamed of the anger I felt at people for chewing, slurping, snorting, breathing, existing. It was at odds with the empathetic version of myself that I so desperately wanted to portray. How could I be considered a kind and understanding person if I wanted to hit someone over the head for having the nerve to sip their tea?

By the age of twenty, I had only confided in a handful of people about my sound sensitivities. Over the next twenty years, I expanded that familiar circle to just a handful more. All this time I held on. I withstood gum chewers and chip crackers in the workplace. I sat stoically in my assigned cinema seat, surrounded by popcorn munchers. I braced myself when an actor in a movie raised a mug to his lips. I clenched my fists, curled my toes, and gritted my teeth; I used headphones, earbuds and my fingers. During an agonizing bus journey where my neighbor wanted to go through the entire flavor range of Kettle chips, I resorted to wrapping a sweater around my head. I even survived two years in Japan, where slurping is considered a sign of politeness and I was on the verge of imploding and/or causing a major international incident. Each. Single. Day.

When I was about 40 years old, the Internet gave me a gift. On Twitter, someone wrote that they were currently in hell because a colleague was sitting at the next desk eating an apple, and a thousand voices immediately responded in chorus of approval. Turns out there was a word for this hell: misophonia. My personality quirk, my shameful secret, had a name. And I wasn’t the only one.

I started to come out, slowly at first. I told a few more friends and colleagues, but casually, as if it was no big deal and not something that was eroding my soul.

Then I decided to write about it. I had never read a book with a main character ready to pounce at the first hint of lip smacking. And by writing about it, I started talking about it more, and by talking about it more, I started freeing myself from my years of suffering in silence (or rather, suffering in sound).

Even before it came out, my book had already generated many “aha!” moments in conversations with other people, in which they understood something about me, about themselves, or about their loved ones. While (carefully) sipping coffee at a friend’s house, our conversation helped my friend understand her young daughter, who had nearly turned over the breakfast table that same morning because her brother was eating cereal while she was trying to write on a birthday card. . I looked at the abandoned birthday card, still on the table, written more and more irregularly as the pen dug into the paper, and I felt that young girl’s pain.

However, I also had hope for her, that she would grow up in a world that understood her better. A world that could one day have popcorn-free movie theaters and food-less train cars. A world in which no one could eat an apple in the workplace without written permission from everyone present. A world where she wouldn’t feel as alone as I do.

I sincerely hope that I help make this world happen. Because I see you, my fellow misophonic. I see you and I understand you. But I choose not to hear you, just as you undoubtedly choose not to hear me.