This Fall I Started to Study Music Technology. This December I Got Tinnitus.

Hey.

It's six in the morning and I couldn't get any sleep because of the sounds in my ears. I found this site and decided to sign up.

So my story goes something like this.

I got accepted to study a three year program for music technology in the summer of 2015. I was overjoyed. It was something I had been wanting to do for a really long time.

First two months of school was a very happy time in my life. I felt grateful and happy, in a way I haven't felt in a long time. I focused on the given tasks at school with determination and weaved my whole day and days off around my studies.

I guess you know what comes next.

Towards the end of the year school projects started mounting up and life became a bit more stressful. I had also been lucky enough to get my first few gigs as front-of-house mixing engineer for some rock gigs. There was a rough spot of around three weeks, where I had lots of school work and two nights mixing shows on top. The mixing gigs were of particular weight because I didn't know the bands or the clubs I worked with and I wanted to do a outstanding job. Anyway, it all added up to be a bit too much and stressed out beyond my limit I got the tinnitus. I really do think the start of the ringing was because of stress - I'm very careful and protective of my ears.

I'm 34 now and come from a background of playing in bands in my twenties. I'm no stranger to tinnitus as you might imagine. Anyway, easily for the past 5 years I lived without tinnitus. Going to sleep I listened to things like my fridge humming on the other side of my flat, or muffled sounds coming from outside. Silence was nice and soothing, I still remember it so vividly. But like I said earlier, I remember tinnitus and problems with sleeping in my twenties. I used to go to sleep listening to albums I liked to help with the sound of ears ringing. All the sound of tinnitus went away so completely at some point, I'm not sure how old I was when the ringing died out, but I had completely forgotten how horrible it is to have this tinnitus. I have two different sounds going on now, it's driving me nuts and depriving me of sleep.

The most messed up thing is that I lived in anxiety and depression for around 8 years or so, drifting from jobs I didn't like to jobs I hated, aimlessly, just getting by. Before this long bad strech I was happy leading a life where I had a job that paid decently and I was putting a lot of effort into the bands I was playing in. Admission to this music technology school this year felt like the break and change I'd been wanting to happen for almost ten years. To finally be able to have a chance at a professional life in music. And now it feels like I'm back to an uncertain, unhappy and despairing emptiness. A shell of a life.

It has been around a week now, I'm still hoping for the tinnitus to go away or something. But I'm starting to feel as if what I have now is going to be with me for a longer time.

thanks for reading and hope to hear from you...