I Live Inside Music
Pragya Bhagat
Texas
I shift the salad bowl from the kitchen counter to the dining table, arrange the table mats and plates and cutlery. Ma brings the daal and rotis, the tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches and kheer. The smell of freshly plucked coriander, now floating atop the daal, hovers in the air.
Papa joins us on the table. So does my brother; he lives half an hour away. As Papa closes his eyes in silent prayer, I plug headphones into my ears. This is the only way I can share a meal with my parents.
The alternative is eating by myself on the backyard porch or eating before or after them. I usually eat before them, but today is different. It is my brother’s birthday. Ma has prepared a feast. I see my family once a year. Sharing a meal on birthdays is a ritual I’m not ready to give up.
Today’s Spotify playlist is titled Old School Classical. It starts with Max Richter’s rendition of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’. In his post-modern take, Richter discarded seventy-five percent of Vivaldi’s original violin concerto, and used the remaining quarter as source material for reinvention. There is a metaphor here, connecting my presence at this table and Richter’s composition.
The right kind of music, when attempting to avoid violent outbursts at dinner, blocks out the unwanted sounds — chewing, slurping, the k-sound — while allowing me to listen and contribute to conversation.
Meals weren’t always accompanied with music. Open-mouthed chewing didn’t used to be a trigger. There was a time before headphones and universal streaming, when the only sound that led to palms pressed over ears was Papa’s whisper. More specifically, his pronunciation of the k-sound when he whispered.
*
San Francisco
Memory: I am seven, lying in bed, trying to sleep. Papa is on the landline in the foyer right outside the bedroom I share with my brother. Papa whispers an itinerary into the telephone, his voice subdued so as not to wake his family. San Francisco to Osaka. He keeps repeating the words, and certain syllables magnify in my mind, taking up more space than others. San Francisco. Osaka. Cisco. Saka. Co. Ka. Coka. Coka. Coka.
I cry and yell, Stop talking. Please stop talking. The next day, I am punished for bad behaviour. Instances like these — in the house, in the car, at corners of family get togethers — are frequent. They occur most in quiet spaces, when the sounds are sharper, cleaner. Sound, in these moments, becomes a weapon. I grow loud, yell and bang and smash, because I must obliterate these sounds and the visceral effect they have on me.
My parents rationalise my actions with narratives of their own. I am the sensitive one. I am convinced there is something wrong with me.
*
Goa
I am thirty-two when my partner’s keyboard tapping starts to elicit the same agitated response as my father’s whispers and slurps once did. I grow worried; no therapist I speak with has an explanation for why this is happening. So I do what any reasonable millennial would do – I turn to Google for answers.
The condition has a name: misophonia. It is a neurobehavioral condition.
Etymologically, “misophonia” deconstructs to “hatred of sound.” Certain sounds, for those living with misophonia, trigger one’s fight-or-flight response. More often than not, triggers arise from those one has grown up with or spent a lot of time with. More often than not, these people are parents or partners. The condition is new; the first time the word “misophonia” was used in a peer-reviewed journal was 2002. Scientific and clinical leaders reached a consensus definition of the term in 2022. In 2024, there is still no treatment for misophonia.
As I immerse myself in misophonia research, I feel less alone. For those of us who live with it, our brains have relatively more neural connections in the regions where sound and touch intersect. It is a sort of synesthesia, a mingling of cerebral worlds that shouldn’t mingle with such enthusiasm. Synesthesia comes in a variety of flavours: some people can taste words, while others can feel a slap on their own cheek when they see it happen to someone else. My flavour consists of feeling sound in my body, in ways that have the potential to be immensely uncomfortable.
I join a misophonia support group. One discussion thread focuses on the kinds of things people have stuck in their ears to enjoy a meal with family: earplugs, but also Kleenex, wads of tissue, toilet paper. Many of the messages in this group are around ordinary events that turn traumatic because of triggers. A family trip where a relative has a cold. Going on a date with a partner who slurps. A co-worker who crinkles the bag of chips when its empty. How every Get-Ready-With-Me video has nails drumming on every product. The group validates each frustration, because each member knows what it means to be misunderstood. Messages of support flood the comments.
You’re not a horrible person.
This is a safe space.
Here’s a link for noise-cancelling headphones.
I want to hug my childhood self. My parents believed I was sensitive. I thought I was crazy. Turns out I just didn’t have the language to explain what was happening to me.
*
Texas
Language is power. Because there is no cure for misophonia, I do not suffer from it; I live with it. Most of the year, I can ignore its presence because my family lives in Texas, while I live in Goa. Phone calls and video chats fuzz the sound. Poor technology saves me.
For two months in the year, however, I visit my family in Austin. It is on these visits that triggers happen daily. There’s only so much music I can listen to. During breakfast, during lunch, during dinner. While watching Netflix with Ma, while planning a Yoga and Writing retreat with Papa. I build rituals to get out of the house, construct a new normal.
One of these new rituals is visiting the library every day for a few hours. There is something incredibly soothing about books; they evoke peace, a dissociation from the external. At the library, I am unbothered by the whispers of strangers thirsting for stories, because here, their voices are simply sound. I strike up conversations with some of these strangers, because nothing they say could possibly anger me the way the people I love anger me.
Since I don’t drive in Austin, I take the bus to the library. On one of these rides, a homeless woman sits across the aisle, speaking to herself.
People were drunk in 1995. When she was employed they shot somebody near the federal court house. That’s where the bus stop is. Most of the people there were black. I was filming it on my camera phone. They were writing false reports. My friend is employed as the CEO there. The people had tattoos all over their arms and legs. I caught it on video too. It wasn’t even summer. They wrote a false report about me. They were employed by the county, but they didn’t even see nothing. How about that security cop, who works at that Methodist Church. She can’t falsify stuff about me.
The automated robot bus voice announces the next bus stop. Now approaching. Congress. And. Oltorf Station, the robot bus voice says, Transfer. For. One.
The woman continues to mumble, even though no one is looking at her.
Don’t you falsify every fucking thing about me, based on somebody actually lying to you in the state of California. Dirty cops. Dirty city. And county and state. Y’all lied about everything. Falsified everything. That’s gonna come back to haunt you, big time. I don’t forget their lies. It’s not looking good. Y’all tagged me, injured me. Sign this, we won’t press charges on her. Drug me all up. Then laugh in my face. You want me to mention what race it was too. That’s a major felony. A federal felony. Y’all are employed at the airports too.
She’s referring, I realise, to me.
*
Texas
“I hardly get to see you,” Ma says, “since you go to the library every day. Time spend karna hai.” The k in karna pricks my insides. I take deep breaths, tell myself I love this woman. The sound hurts, but her intention is not to hurt me. I don’t want to hurt her.
We plan a mother-daughter date. We take a walk around Town Lake, sit on a bench next to two squawking ducks. The squawking grows louder but the ducks don’t move. As one ruffles her feathers, I notice an egg. I am surrounded by motherhood.
On this lunch date, Ma and I eat at Whole Foods, buy pay-by-the-pound meals, fill them with quinoa and vegetables, some steamed, some baked, pour sauces over it all, fill our biodegradable boxes and sit in the sun. Ma asks if I’m seeing anyone, then if I’m happy in Goa.
If my mother was to visit my home, she’d see money plants everywhere, their roots floating in glass bottles that once held rum. She’d see the balcony and the line of filth that accumulates by its entrance, the army of ants that have infested the kitchen windowsill and bathroom, the clouds of dust and hair sliding into wall corners, the drying rack for the dishes, so tall it prevents one cupboard from opening, the crumpled bedsheet that I wake up every morning to and think about changing, but don’t, the clothes hanging on the rope in the balcony, the tiny saplings growing in the rectangular pots.
“I am happy,” I tell her, “mostly.” It’s a good life, amongst the sun and the ocean and fields lush with fertility.
I ask Ma if she’s seen her counsellor lately. She hasn’t. Her blood pressure is still high.
“What can I do,” she says, “it is what it is.” Mortality nudges its way into our conversation. “I am going on walks,” she says. “I’m fine.”
She doesn’t talk about her rheumatoid arthritis or her insomnia. I don’t talk about my misophonia. We don’t suffer from these conditions; we live with them. Living with them means not making the conditions the protagonists of our stories. Today, we are the main characters. We take pictures; some are candid, some are staged. In all of the photographs, a white wire is visible under each of my ear lobes.
During this four-hour outing, I get through three albums by The Beatles, soundtracks from four Mani Ratnam movies, and a whole lot of Sufjan Stevens. When we get back home, I head to my room, shut the door, and remove the headphones. The pleasure of this removal is similar to ejecting a bra at the end of a long summer day.
*
Goa
In telling Ma about my life in India, I mention the noise; there’s so much of it. Birds and dogs and cows, the rustle of palm fronds, the bread-seller on his bicycle with his squawking horn. In the morning, the echo of a peacock. At night, a cricket concerto.
I am surrounded by conversation; sometimes it feels unnecessary. Like at this bar I frequent. People come here to drink and smoke and talk about politics and the last party they attended, how crazy was that night, their shock when so-and-so hooked up with so-and-so. They try to tell a good story, to feel excited even though it’s their fifth time telling it this night, and maybe the performance will be convincing enough, maybe their friends will laugh at how funny and outrageous it is. And because everyone else knows how hard it is to perform, because they are trying to do the same thing, they reward the effort with smiles. They laugh anyway, because people look more attractive when they laugh, and everyone thinks everyone is looking at them. Because this bar — if you can call it that — doesn’t bathe its guests in shadow to airbrush away the wrinkles or bad teeth or big ears or stringy hair or pudgy neck. Here, the light shows everyone as they are, the idea being that as themselves they might be more relaxed. No one is relaxed.
A loneliness hovers here, in this bar. I feel its presence in my throbbing temples. The loneliness settles on my skin, fine, like volcanic ash, and I pick at the skin around my nails. I don’t want to talk, so sometimes I just read. I don’t tell Ma about this bar or the loneliness. It is a different sort of discomfort, this loneliness, not as visceral as a misophonia trigger. The latter fills me with agitation, while the former is an emptying.
*
Texas
Explaining misophonia to others often leads to comparisons. I know what you mean.
I used to hate it when chalk screeched against the cardboard. My girlfriend chews with her mouth open too. It’s so annoying.
The intention of these statements is to sympathize. The thing is, I don’t think you know what I mean. On the spectrum of annoyance, misophonia is the ultraviolet light you can not detect. In an essay on misophonia, Sussie Anie describes her experience living with misophonia.
“I carry music everywhere because some sounds unravel me.The distress these sounds trigger is so severe that I used to wish for my hearing to fail. Sounds that hurt are not ugly… they are innocuous sounds everyone makes. I only wanted silence. To help this wish come true, I kept it to myself. It is hard to describe a condition for which you have no name. For the past ten years or so, I have lived inside music.”
Anie’s words show me that she does in fact know what I mean.
On my last day in Austin, I walk down the path just across the street of my parents’ suburban lawn. The path leads to a wooded forest with a scattering of birch, Texas elm, and live Oak. A winding creek gurgles along stretches of the path. A herd of white-tailed deer watch me with their beady eyes; the herbivore, city authorities claim, is becoming a problem due to its overpopulation. On this walk, I appreciate the distraction non-human species offer. Here, I can focus on sounds that soothe: leaf rustle, bird chirp, deer prance, gravel crunch, stream babble. This, too, is music.
Ma drives me to the airport, the radio is on; it is an unspoken rule now, to turn the radio louder than usual when we are both in the car. She changes the station from NPR to the one that plays songs. Charley Crockett’s voice tells us what it means to live inside music.
Circus is coming through
And everybody knows
That when you purchase a ticket
You expect to get a show
Take a look at me, I'm just a clown
And on my face I wear a frown
I've paid the cost to hang around
So take a look at me, I'm just a clown
***
About the Author
Pragya Bhagat is a performance poet, essayist, and author. Her work explores intersections between mental health, relationships, the body, and belonging. She lives in Goa.