#auditory overload

auditory overload is a bee climbing into my ear, making its nest right in front of my eardrum. I can feel her tiny wings scratching the canal of my ear, making noises so loud and irritating, I want to push my pen into my head.

but I don’t, I just sit there and start losing feeling in my face as my vision gets foggy.

my body is so afraid of the bee, it chooses to play dead, and the bee is so stupid, it believes me. Tiredly, it falls asleep and with it so do I.

suddenly it’s so quiet, it’s peaceful and I am gone to another universe; one, in which I am still the same but the people around me finally just shut up.

dissociation is a curse. I like to be in control and if I dissociate I am not. Physically, I am at my most vulnerable point.

And still, the sweetness of this curse is incomprehensible, because mentally I am never as untouchable again.

Believe me when I say, that I am ready to open my mouth and swallow all of those bees if it’s means I can rest for at least once in my life.

I really, really love this prompt. I struggle with sensory overload a lot so writing this was kinda cathartic. Geralt is having an issue with auditory overload in this one because I knew that I could make that realistic, at least to my own experiences. 

I hope this is what you were looking for! <3 Thank you so much for this prompt, it’s wonderful!

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The sounds were too much.

Every shout, every whisper, every strum of that stupid fucking lute, was killing him.

Geralt had been anxious since he’d finished his last contract, set on edge, and every noise was just making it that much worse.

He thought he’d be fine. He would meet up with Jaskier at the inn, eat some food, drink some ale, let the adrenaline seep from his body after his last hunt, but no.

Everything just kept getting worse.

First it was just the general noise, the low hum of talking was mildly annoying, but he could ignore it. Then the lute started irritating him, although it wasn’t a sound that typically bothered him. In fact, he normally enjoyed it when Jaskier played. Then the clapping along made his hands clench and his breathing quicken.

Suddenly, his vision was blurring and he was becoming light headed. He just needed all the noise to stop. It was too much, too much.

Too much.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and flinched away. It was then that he registered Jaskier’s voice. The bard was speaking quietly but Geralt couldn’t understand him. The next thing he knew, he was being led through the crowd of the inn to their room.

Jaskier started talking again, still soft, but it was too much.

“Please stop,” he gasped, breathing ragged. Geralt sat heavily on the bed, hands clenched over his ears.

He heard Jaskier’s sharp intake of breath and then felt gentle hands guide him down on the bed. Then he felt something lay across his head and the noise around him got less intense.

A pillow.

He moved his hand on top of it to help muffle the sounds. With his hearing, he wouldn’t be able to get rid of noise completely, but it was much easier to handle now, away from the loud patrons of the inn.

He felt Jaskier lay on the bed behind him and whisper, “Is this okay?”

Geralt moved closer to Jaskier, listening to the steady beat of the bard’s heart. The sound was comforting now, and he focused on it, drowning out all of the other noise, taking comfort from the heat of Jaskier wrapping himself around Geralt.

He would be okay.

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I now have a prompt fill 2020 masterlist if anyone wants to check out the other prompt fills I’ve done today

YES!  This is a very common autistic symptom.  Sensory overload is one of the most common symptoms for autistics.  Each of us has a different level of tolerance for the 5 senses, and some autisitcs can handle one better than another, but high sensitivity to sound is probably the most common.

Not being able to pick one sound out of a bunch of them is probably Auditory Processing Disorder (but not necessarily, you may just be overwhelmed by Too Much Input, which simply shuts your brain down from being able to process any input).  

Here’s a good blurb I found on understood.org:

There are four auditory processing skills that people with APD may struggle with:

Auditory discrimination: noticing, comparing, and distinguishing between separate sounds

Auditory figure-ground discrimination: focusing on the important sounds in a noisy setting

Auditory memory: recalling what you’ve heard, either immediately or in the future

Auditory sequencing: understanding and recalling the order of sounds and words

But even if you DON’T have APD, you can still get Sensory Overload from Too Many Noises or Too Loud Noises or Bad Noises (a Bad Noise is one that makes you feel horrible when you hear it, even if it doesn’t ‘hurt’.  The famous one is “nails on a chalkboard”, even allistics understand that one.  For me though, the Bad Noises are chewing sounds, plastic bags rustling and potato chip bags crinkling, if I hear that I will cover my ears and rub them really hard to try to “erase” the sound and possibly cry).

This is extremely common in autism and I completely understand you.  As for your mom telling you not to mute the TV, I’m not sure why she’s saying that, but if she is the sort of person who is able to listen to you, you can try explaining to her about sensory overload because of sound, and how horrible it is for you, and that muting the TV gives you mental peace.