I Have Decided to Quit Music

I'm a 23 year old musician with T and H. I sing and play guitar. You can read my story here.

Long story short: Got T after standing in the front row of a concert in 2013. This January, after a guitar recording session, I had my second serious T and H spike.

Yesterday, I decided to quit music.

Well, for the most part. Bear with me:

I've wanted to become a musician since I laid my hands on a guitar (was 13 years old). I've always liked to write, so as soon as I learned some chords, writing songs just came naturally to me. As i grew up, so did my ambitions. I took music very seriously in terms of getting as good at it as I possibly could. From 2014 on I also fell in love with producing. My long term goal was to set up a recording studio for producing my and my friends' records, and continuing to write and perform. Music was my identity and biggest dream.

Since this last spike, one thing became crystal clear to me: if I kept performing, rehearsing, etc, even with good hearing protection, there would be no guarantee that my T and H wouldn't get worse over time. I struggled with these thoughts... I didn't know what else to do besides music. I felt like my life was over, and was on the verge of making plans for suicide.

Then I came across this Buzzfeed article about H.

This article is a pretty tough read, and I don't recommend it if you are going through a bad spot. Ironically, when I read it, I was at my absolute worst. Imagining how devastating it could be if I got worse was one thing; seeing it... was soul crushing on a level I can barely describe. It fucking destroyed me. I cried my heart out for hours. Finally, I made my decision: I had to quit pursuing music as my job.

Then something weird dawned on me. As I've said before, I've always liked to write. Music fulfilled my need to express myself artistically... but so did writing. I've always loved stories, and had great fun in writing short fiction stories and poetry. I just never took it seriously since I was so focused on my music.

In a weird way, I felt... relief? I had something something to look forward to. Something to work on, to do again and again while (hopefully) getting better at it. The medium is different, but in many ways it satisfied most of my needs just like music did. And some thoughts I had just changed upside down. I used to think "damn, I'm in the start of my music career and I already have to give it up". Suddenly I realized: yeah, I'm still young... that makes a change of plans much easier. Besides, I still have music. I can still play and record in my homestudio.

This isn't really a success story though. Yes, in many ways I am fortunate. My T isn't much intrusive in my day to day life. My H is much more bothersome, but I can go to most places. But I have to quit performing, attending concerts and going to the movies, thing I greatly enjoyed. And though I realized dreams can change, having to give up something I wanted for so long is very hard.

Right now my biggest fear is getting worse through "normal" sound exposure over time, reaching a state where I can no longer cope with H. How can I know what seems loud due to H and what is actually damaging? Will latching doors, sneezes and bursts of laughter cause damage after small damage?

This is troubling, and hard, and many times I feel like I don't have the strength. But at least, for the first time in two months, I don't feel like giving up.

 

Try the offficial TRT retraining. Im from the netherlands and i talked to a dj here who had severe h. He did the TRT for two years and now he is back producing and Goes out to clubs once a month. I also have t and h. The h is now on a point that i dont go out anymore. Everytime it gets worse after i went out even with my 33 decibel custom earplugs. Im planning to do the offivial TRT

 

I look forward to trying TRT someday. The way I see it, TRT won't to a thing to my T but it might desensitize my ears. There is one thing to be careful about TRT though: your LDLs might increase, but your ears are still much more sensitive to damage.

The main reason I haven't tried TRT is, well, money. I live in Brazil, so the treatment is extra costly for me. Let me illustrate this through the minimum wage: there's a clinic in my hometown that offers sound therapy treatment (not even traditional TRT) priced at roughly 3.200$ (converted to dollars). This is about 440 times the minimum wage per hour in the USA... and about 2.352 times the hourly minimum wage here. I can't justify paying that much money on a treatment that 1) isn't by-the-book TRT and 2) doesn't have conclusive evidence about its effectiveness even if it were.

In the future, when (if) I have a steady job, I might look for a better clinic and do it.

 

No one knows today how to cure hyperacusis, but a couple of adjustment to your life may help, like living in a quieter environment, doing exercise, a healthy diet, stretching, physiotherapy, listening at home to sound you like, white noise, etc I hope you improve over time!

 

I am sorry to hear it. Well as you said these days all electrical instruments can be played very very quite .. guitar, drums, keyboard, you can record silently and others can listen to it louder. Yes it is sad not to be able to perform but maybe you can one day again .. who knows ..

And do TRT yourself, you are a musician, find noises the mask your tinnitus and sound nice, learn applied psychology and apply it to yourself. As Juan said, healthy diet, stretching, doing exercise etc ... find a smart way if not create a smart wa that works for you

 

You don't have to give up music entirely.

Production and performance you will have to give up, yes. But writing music is still quite possible. Writing and composing doesn't require concentrative deep listening that production demands and it doesn't require volume like performance requires.

There's no reason you can't compose for other bands or prepare scratch mix quality demos.

Every musician who departs music always comes back and so will you. This is a good time to pivot and for you to study music composition in all its aspects. After a while you can even get to the skill level where you don't even have to listen to your compositions.

Super producers like Max Martin and RedOne hire many ghost producers to create a single song. Why not become a compositional cog in that machine? Or be a super producer and get a bunch of ghost producers to complete your vision?

If producing is still in your heart maybe look at less challenging genres that may be outside of your own genre that only needs simple production like hiphop, rap or ambient. That stuff can be done in less than a day.

 

Your young. Protect your ears and in a few years I bet your back at it.

 

what's stopping you from playing music at lower volumes that you can handle?