The sound inside
by Montserrat Mendez
Recently, a dear friend,
Justin, whose heart is as big as the thrum of a church bell and whose curiosity never leaves you untouched sent me an article.
The Bells Keep Ringing.
A cruel title. A fair one. A well written descent into a man’s intimate affliction: Tinnitus.
I read it with recognition, with a kind of hollow nodding,
yes, yes, that’s it!
And also, with a twist of bitter green envy, which is of course the most honest kind. Because the man in the article, poor fellow, he is annoyed. Not undone. He hears it, but it is not him. He gets to live with it. He gets to live. I don’t know that I do.
The sound for me...
No, not a sound, a siren, a shudder, a scream folded so tightly into silence it becomes indistinguishable from my own breath has been with me since March 2014.
It does not rest. It is always on. It has no rhythm, no intermission, and I, aging now, in a body increasingly sympathetic to entropy have noticed it worsening. Gathering strength. As if it too were aging. As if it too were angry.
People, I know, they mean well, I know they mean well; send me tips. Tricks. Breaths and oils and neural rewiring games. Desperation disguised as advice. Magic disguised as medicine. It’s the sort of thing that RFK Jr. would dine out on; Nothing is as bad as you say, surely! Surely! If it were, someone would’ve fixed it! Surely it is not incurable, because we cannot bear that word. Not incurable, no! Only undiagnosed. Only unfixed. Only misunderstood. If I can fix you, then I don’t have to sit beside you in your suffering, and I don’t have to admit that suffering might be final, or fathomless, or… forever.
You see, there are people who love me. And they need me to be fixed. Because they need me not in pain. Because if I am in pain, then I am not the brother, not the son, not the artist, not the charmer, not the flirt, not the joke-maker, not the bridge. I am... what? A hum. An ache. A thing to be endured.
And what a thing, to live like this. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing.
And I try! God knows I try, and I fake my way through being okay. It’s a performance. A drag act. A lip-sync to the sound of sanity. And most days, I deserve an award. But no one's giving those out, not for endurance, not for pain management. No one claps when you write a page without screaming.
Except. this last year. I haven’t been okay. I don’t even think I remember what okay felt like. The sound has gotten loud, so loud. Not just loud like volume but loud like invasion, like colonization, like a flag planted in my head declaring it conquered territory.
At best? Three hours of sleep per night. On a good night. And that’s not sleep, not really. That’s unconsciousness with an alarm clock. My body lies still but my brain... it’s on. Always on.
Here’s what I’ve noticed,
what I’ve catalogued,
over the past year, as the ringing rose like floodwater:
I am in pain every single day. And not just emotional pain, not just psychological malaise with its metaphors and soft poetic distance. No. I mean...
Pain.
Literal. Physical. My nervous system, frayed, underfed by rest. My body, this body I love and loathe, is revolting against me. My shoulders grind. My toes ache. My fingers tremble. My bones ache with the exhaustion of carrying sound. And so...
Mediocrity of any kind? No. I can’t afford it. I can’t afford you if you are just here to waste my one sacred resource: TIME.
I ended two creative relationships recently, people who weren’t getting it done. People who didn’t understand that when I deliver; when I overdeliver! I am doing it through pain. I am dragging an anvil across a stage and still managing to smile. So no. No more apologizing for refusing mediocrity. Excellence is the only currency I have left.
I cannot just hang out. I can’t do it. I won’t. Don’t ask me to put my body in the line of fire so you can feel less alone. My nervous system is threadbare. My edges are live wires. You want to be around me? It's got to be about the work. If I come to your show, your reading, your opening, your damn potluck; it is not casual. It is not social. It is not fun. It is me bartering in wages of pain to witness something I hope will make it worth it. It is pain converted into presence. It is my offering, and now I find so few people or experiences are worth the pain. And I am sorry for that. It just the way things are.
I’ve become sociopathic to a lot of things. Not on purpose. Not maliciously. Just my emotional circuitry has been rewired by the pitch. My buttons are broken. My empathy is on a time delay. I don’t feel things in the moment. Nor do I choose to feel everything. I have to slowly open the vents to feeling. I don’t cry when it’s expected. I don’t smile when prompted. I write. That’s when the emotion comes. After. In the silence of the keyboard. The aftermath.
And if I do feel something in the moment; if you get me, if your work gets to me; then know you’ve pierced the shell. You’ve focused me. And that’s not nothing. That’s sacred. That makes life worth living. I slow my days down so I can find these moments, these people, these gifts.
People’s voices, their presence, their vibration can have a seismic effect on me. Not metaphorically. Literally. The wrong timbre, the wrong pitch, a voice that resonates too closely to the frequency of the ringing in my skull, and it’s like throwing gasoline on a fire and asking me to sit calmly in the warmth. And I know, I know, I’ve let people go, sometimes abruptly, sometimes cruelly, and some of those people are wonderful. Loving. Gentle. Deserving. But if you’re one of those people, and you’re reading this, please understand: it’s not you. It’s not you. It truly is me. It’s the noise. It’s the acoustics of my suffering. I am curating my world for survival, not comfort. I’m making choices with a scalpel and shaking hands.
And now we get to the part no one wants to say aloud:
I no longer judge suicide.
I say this with no melodrama, no violin, no black veil. It is not a cry for help. It is not a performance. It is, in fact, a liberation to say it: I see suicide as a viable, rational, morally neutral choice. I know this will make people clutch their pearls and organize interventions and whisper about mental health. But I am not interested in being rescued. I am not in crisis. I am in continuum. This is long, and ongoing, and exhausting. And while I am not planning to die today, or next week, or next year; there is no way, none, that I can imagine living with this noise at 60. Or 70. I cannot imagine an aging, aching body, this meat suit sagging and warping, trying to function in tandem with this infernal, invisible siren.
And so yes: I have a plan. Not out of hopelessness, but out of clarity. It is a mercy, a way of saying enough if enough ever comes. That knowledge brings me peace. To This. This hyperactive, ungovernable, hell-siren brain of mine. Think of it this way: imagine two rivers. One calm. Measured. Drinkable. That’s most brains. Then there’s mine; flooded, relentless, shattering rocks on its way down the mountain, not out of malice, just force. That’s what it’s like to live inside this skull. My thoughts come like storms, unasked and too fast. And the noise. the noise is relentless.
And of course, the side effects:
Fatigue so deep it scrapes the bone.
Sleeplessness that folds time into nonsense.
Concentration that collapses mid-sentence.
Memory like shattered glass—present, but in shards.
Mood swings, oh, the mood swings, I could compose a symphony of them.
Stress like a hairline crack running the full height of me.
Irritability, frustration, alienation, despair; my daily bread.
Twenty-five million Americans have tinnitus. And if that number comforts you good. Let it. But I am not among the majority. I am one of the two million for whom it is not manageable, not “an annoyance,” not “well, you just have to live with it.” I don’t “live with it.” I survive despite it. I know this noise will kill me. I’ve already pictured it; the stroke, the seizure, the way the brain will finally scream ENOUGH and collapse. Not from illness. From volume. From time. If I have to pick a date and time, then that's what I will do.
But here’s the thing: until that day, I will write and try to tell stories. I will demand excellence. I will not apologize for preserving myself like a fragile, sacred thing. I will still make art. That much remains. I will always work, collaborate, argue, agonize in green rooms and rehearsal halls and revision labs and godforsaken Zooms. Because telling a story is the only religion I have left that does not punish me for doubt.
And I will try every day to forgive the world for not being quieter.
But the rest of it:
the dinners,
the wine,
the forced mirth of social contracts,
the café chairs scraping pavement,
No. No more of that. I cannot.
I used to really want love. To be in love. to have someone be in love with me. Partnership. But now, now I think I would just be dragging someone into a storm they didn’t start. I would be an anchor dressed up as a man. I don’t want to be anyone’s burden. I don’t want anyone to watch me erode in real time.
So, I’m gently, consciously, wrapping up the personal threads of my life. Tying knots where once I left things open-ended. Sending quiet goodbyes into the air like paper lanterns. I’m done pretending I can do it all.
The only thing I want to do is write. Tell some stories. And then go.
Because the noise is getting louder. And with it, the pain. The ache has deepened: it’s in my bones now, my joints, my teeth. My shoulders have become ruins. And my hearing, strangely, terrifyingly, is going. Isn’t that funny? That the louder it gets inside, the less I can hear outside. What happens when the only sound left in my world is that sound? When the last real human voice has faded and all that’s left is the shriek of whatever is broken inside me?
I don’t know.
God help me, I don’t know.
Justin, whose heart is as big as the thrum of a church bell and whose curiosity never leaves you untouched sent me an article.
The Bells Keep Ringing.
A cruel title. A fair one. A well written descent into a man’s intimate affliction: Tinnitus.
I read it with recognition, with a kind of hollow nodding,
yes, yes, that’s it!
And also, with a twist of bitter green envy, which is of course the most honest kind. Because the man in the article, poor fellow, he is annoyed. Not undone. He hears it, but it is not him. He gets to live with it. He gets to live. I don’t know that I do.
The sound for me...
No, not a sound, a siren, a shudder, a scream folded so tightly into silence it becomes indistinguishable from my own breath has been with me since March 2014.
It does not rest. It is always on. It has no rhythm, no intermission, and I, aging now, in a body increasingly sympathetic to entropy have noticed it worsening. Gathering strength. As if it too were aging. As if it too were angry.
People, I know, they mean well, I know they mean well; send me tips. Tricks. Breaths and oils and neural rewiring games. Desperation disguised as advice. Magic disguised as medicine. It’s the sort of thing that RFK Jr. would dine out on; Nothing is as bad as you say, surely! Surely! If it were, someone would’ve fixed it! Surely it is not incurable, because we cannot bear that word. Not incurable, no! Only undiagnosed. Only unfixed. Only misunderstood. If I can fix you, then I don’t have to sit beside you in your suffering, and I don’t have to admit that suffering might be final, or fathomless, or… forever.
You see, there are people who love me. And they need me to be fixed. Because they need me not in pain. Because if I am in pain, then I am not the brother, not the son, not the artist, not the charmer, not the flirt, not the joke-maker, not the bridge. I am... what? A hum. An ache. A thing to be endured.
And what a thing, to live like this. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing.
And I try! God knows I try, and I fake my way through being okay. It’s a performance. A drag act. A lip-sync to the sound of sanity. And most days, I deserve an award. But no one's giving those out, not for endurance, not for pain management. No one claps when you write a page without screaming.
Except. this last year. I haven’t been okay. I don’t even think I remember what okay felt like. The sound has gotten loud, so loud. Not just loud like volume but loud like invasion, like colonization, like a flag planted in my head declaring it conquered territory.
At best? Three hours of sleep per night. On a good night. And that’s not sleep, not really. That’s unconsciousness with an alarm clock. My body lies still but my brain... it’s on. Always on.
Here’s what I’ve noticed,
what I’ve catalogued,
over the past year, as the ringing rose like floodwater:
I am in pain every single day. And not just emotional pain, not just psychological malaise with its metaphors and soft poetic distance. No. I mean...
Pain.
Literal. Physical. My nervous system, frayed, underfed by rest. My body, this body I love and loathe, is revolting against me. My shoulders grind. My toes ache. My fingers tremble. My bones ache with the exhaustion of carrying sound. And so...
Mediocrity of any kind? No. I can’t afford it. I can’t afford you if you are just here to waste my one sacred resource: TIME.
I ended two creative relationships recently, people who weren’t getting it done. People who didn’t understand that when I deliver; when I overdeliver! I am doing it through pain. I am dragging an anvil across a stage and still managing to smile. So no. No more apologizing for refusing mediocrity. Excellence is the only currency I have left.
I cannot just hang out. I can’t do it. I won’t. Don’t ask me to put my body in the line of fire so you can feel less alone. My nervous system is threadbare. My edges are live wires. You want to be around me? It's got to be about the work. If I come to your show, your reading, your opening, your damn potluck; it is not casual. It is not social. It is not fun. It is me bartering in wages of pain to witness something I hope will make it worth it. It is pain converted into presence. It is my offering, and now I find so few people or experiences are worth the pain. And I am sorry for that. It just the way things are.
I’ve become sociopathic to a lot of things. Not on purpose. Not maliciously. Just my emotional circuitry has been rewired by the pitch. My buttons are broken. My empathy is on a time delay. I don’t feel things in the moment. Nor do I choose to feel everything. I have to slowly open the vents to feeling. I don’t cry when it’s expected. I don’t smile when prompted. I write. That’s when the emotion comes. After. In the silence of the keyboard. The aftermath.
And if I do feel something in the moment; if you get me, if your work gets to me; then know you’ve pierced the shell. You’ve focused me. And that’s not nothing. That’s sacred. That makes life worth living. I slow my days down so I can find these moments, these people, these gifts.
People’s voices, their presence, their vibration can have a seismic effect on me. Not metaphorically. Literally. The wrong timbre, the wrong pitch, a voice that resonates too closely to the frequency of the ringing in my skull, and it’s like throwing gasoline on a fire and asking me to sit calmly in the warmth. And I know, I know, I’ve let people go, sometimes abruptly, sometimes cruelly, and some of those people are wonderful. Loving. Gentle. Deserving. But if you’re one of those people, and you’re reading this, please understand: it’s not you. It’s not you. It truly is me. It’s the noise. It’s the acoustics of my suffering. I am curating my world for survival, not comfort. I’m making choices with a scalpel and shaking hands.
And now we get to the part no one wants to say aloud:
I no longer judge suicide.
I say this with no melodrama, no violin, no black veil. It is not a cry for help. It is not a performance. It is, in fact, a liberation to say it: I see suicide as a viable, rational, morally neutral choice. I know this will make people clutch their pearls and organize interventions and whisper about mental health. But I am not interested in being rescued. I am not in crisis. I am in continuum. This is long, and ongoing, and exhausting. And while I am not planning to die today, or next week, or next year; there is no way, none, that I can imagine living with this noise at 60. Or 70. I cannot imagine an aging, aching body, this meat suit sagging and warping, trying to function in tandem with this infernal, invisible siren.
And so yes: I have a plan. Not out of hopelessness, but out of clarity. It is a mercy, a way of saying enough if enough ever comes. That knowledge brings me peace. To This. This hyperactive, ungovernable, hell-siren brain of mine. Think of it this way: imagine two rivers. One calm. Measured. Drinkable. That’s most brains. Then there’s mine; flooded, relentless, shattering rocks on its way down the mountain, not out of malice, just force. That’s what it’s like to live inside this skull. My thoughts come like storms, unasked and too fast. And the noise. the noise is relentless.
And of course, the side effects:
Fatigue so deep it scrapes the bone.
Sleeplessness that folds time into nonsense.
Concentration that collapses mid-sentence.
Memory like shattered glass—present, but in shards.
Mood swings, oh, the mood swings, I could compose a symphony of them.
Stress like a hairline crack running the full height of me.
Irritability, frustration, alienation, despair; my daily bread.
Twenty-five million Americans have tinnitus. And if that number comforts you good. Let it. But I am not among the majority. I am one of the two million for whom it is not manageable, not “an annoyance,” not “well, you just have to live with it.” I don’t “live with it.” I survive despite it. I know this noise will kill me. I’ve already pictured it; the stroke, the seizure, the way the brain will finally scream ENOUGH and collapse. Not from illness. From volume. From time. If I have to pick a date and time, then that's what I will do.
But here’s the thing: until that day, I will write and try to tell stories. I will demand excellence. I will not apologize for preserving myself like a fragile, sacred thing. I will still make art. That much remains. I will always work, collaborate, argue, agonize in green rooms and rehearsal halls and revision labs and godforsaken Zooms. Because telling a story is the only religion I have left that does not punish me for doubt.
And I will try every day to forgive the world for not being quieter.
But the rest of it:
the dinners,
the wine,
the forced mirth of social contracts,
the café chairs scraping pavement,
No. No more of that. I cannot.
I used to really want love. To be in love. to have someone be in love with me. Partnership. But now, now I think I would just be dragging someone into a storm they didn’t start. I would be an anchor dressed up as a man. I don’t want to be anyone’s burden. I don’t want anyone to watch me erode in real time.
So, I’m gently, consciously, wrapping up the personal threads of my life. Tying knots where once I left things open-ended. Sending quiet goodbyes into the air like paper lanterns. I’m done pretending I can do it all.
The only thing I want to do is write. Tell some stories. And then go.
Because the noise is getting louder. And with it, the pain. The ache has deepened: it’s in my bones now, my joints, my teeth. My shoulders have become ruins. And my hearing, strangely, terrifyingly, is going. Isn’t that funny? That the louder it gets inside, the less I can hear outside. What happens when the only sound left in my world is that sound? When the last real human voice has faded and all that’s left is the shriek of whatever is broken inside me?
I don’t know.
God help me, I don’t know.
