Headphones

Headphones are my sanctuary.

I always thought it was normal. That everyone puts them on to cut themselves off from those distracting voices from outside and inside. To focus on something so deeply that time and space cease to exist. Not to immerse myself in music and revel in the layers and channels flowing through your ears. No. Music was never the goal; it was always a wall, a barrier protecting me from the world. The louder, the stronger, the more marching-like, the deeper the trance became. Feeling fast percussion and aggressive riffs, I felt like armor revealed itself on my shoulders, a scarlet hood shading my temples. I no longer looked at the screen, but at a labyrinth of obstacles to overcome.

Without headphones on my ears, the world caught me in a blink. Whether it’s a change in traffic movement outside the window caught by the corner of my eye, or a conversation a few desks away, a memory of that evening in a club at the sight of a billboard the color of her purse. It doesn’t matter if that evening was yesterday or 15 years ago. Without protection from stimuli, I tear myself between the external world and sink into the internal one. Everywhere, but not in this moment and place. Everywhere except doing what I should.

I couldn’t always put them on. No. Sitting in the front row, I heard that music on paper. In the margins where I hastily drew stories not to describe them but to find myself in them. They helped me sit still because I wasn’t there. Teachers knew better than to interrupt me. They quickly understood that deep in the labyrinth of imagination, their words reached me and sank into memory. Only when they needed me to answer did they have to pull me out by repeating the same question three times.

I was lucky with good teachers. They knew how not to break a person with AuDHD a decade before the DSM allowed for dual diagnosis. Only a shame that no one told them to teach me protection from freedom. Learning was so simple as long as they set the rules of the game.

Maybe one day I’ll actually write it down on paper.