Tune Out the Noise and Turn On the Silence

How do the concussed cope in New York City? The chronicity of sounds is really a sort of fatalism writ large. For weeks on end this past winter, I sat inside my apt holding vigil at the balcony window, sitting in silence not of my choosing. A calm kind of torment.

It started with a hit and run accident in the back streets of industrial south Brooklyn. When the truck struck me at the intersection of Throop and Wallabout, I wasn’t wearing a helmet. My head hit the hood then the asphalt scrambling the chemicals and circuitry in my brain. I woke up in a puddle of my own vomit and a paramedic yelling over me.

C-A-N-Y-O-U-H-E-A-R-M-E.

Strapped to the gurney and beyond impairment, I was asked by one of the paramedics for my emergency contact. Thinking I would spare my family the grief this Thanksgiving weekend, I said to call Justin, my ex turned gay best friend living in Florida. My face, ankle, and head pulsed with the sound of the siren. The crucible of the concussion was just beginning. Occupying a space straddling presence and absence a poke to the shoulder brought me back into the ambulance.

The paramedic passed my phone back to me with a look of painful pity: “um, I think that was the wrong Justin.”

Just minutes before the crash, I was on a first date. It did not go well. He talked about milk for a while. Before we could part ways, he invited me back to his place to park my bike as it was getting late. Not wanting to commit to a second date, I declined. His name is also Justin and this Justin just received a call from a paramedic informing him of his next of kin nomination, which he too declined. I was launched into stage five-clinger status. Thinking back, I remember the relief that came with the timely call from my brother, Michael and knowing there would be no need to discuss a second date with Justin.

But things got worse before they got better. On my first visit with Dr. Gerald Smallberg, he asked me to take off my coat and shoes-- a standard test for balance and dexterity unbeknownst to me. “Oh, make myself comfortable,” I said as politely as I could manage. I was suspicious. My medical report noted: “she was somewhat anxious, but also had a sense of humor about questioning.” He explained to me that my excitatory neurons were at full tilt. My post-concussion vulnerability left me with what is neurologically diagnosed as a “heightened state of activity,” a delicate and devastating blend of anxiety, amnesia, vertigo, and hypersensitivity to light and sound. The city soundscape became crippling. I was forced to retreat to a cave of darkness and silence.

To make matters worse, my apartment in East Williamsburg overlooks the rumbling overpass of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway solidifying its place in the top five loudest neighborhoods in 2017 with the most noise complaints:

1. Central Brooklyn
2. Washington Heights
3. Harlem
4. Bushwick and Williamsburg
5. Bronx and Fordham & Northwest Brooklyn (tied for 5th)

Source: 2017 The City of New York OpenData

Like New York City, our ears are awake all the time. Close your eyes and you can be alone. Closing your ears can be a bit harder. It didn’t help that my anxiety was amplified with sound.

What I wanted was a black-padded, soundproof personal safety room.

What I got was Bose QuietComfort 35 over-ear wireless headphones.

I tried the QuietComfort 20 earphones, all three tips, but like trying on bathing suits, the things just don’t fit right.

The noise-cancelling circuitry uses microphones to capture incoming sounds and creates inverse waves that feed back into the headphones. It turns the rumbling, the screeching, and the sirens that come mostly in five min increments into an ambient antidote that I so desperately needed.

Months later, still trapped in a concussion-induced paranoia, I began to think that all my thoughts were being swallowed by silence-- a foreign and frightening feeling. Carl Jung suggests to “be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it?" And so I have.

We all have our own unconscious patterns and style of self-undoing. So for all the times I have turned up the volume to tune out all the noise, I experienced salvation with silence-- not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise. My traumatic brain injury buried me in this newfound silence-- deeply, madly, truly. Because when you’ve been busy riding high and loud on the city for as long as I have, it’s easy to not realize what you are taking in. You take everything in.

Standing on the subway platform, I was surrounded by people wearing various and variable audio adornments perhaps playing nothing, signaling “silence please”. It’s a quiet truce that is not summoned, but turned on with a flip of a switch so we feel less like frauds. Perhaps those are the very hours when silence grows; its growing can be tormenting and not easy to hear. So I developed new rituals. The trick is to turn on the silence so it doesn’t get crowded out of life.