I have tinnitus. Six years. I want to write about it properly, because everything I found was either a medical pamphlet or someone in crisis, and I'm neither.

Forty-one. It started in October 2019 after one concert, which is embarrassingly on-the-nose. Not even loud by the standards of my twenties. I woke up with a high tone in my left ear and assumed it'd be gone by Tuesday.

"Ringing in the ears" is a useless phrase. Mine is a tone around eleven kilohertz — above the top of a piano. Constant. It doesn't pulse, hasn't varied meaningfully in six years. It is not loud in any objective sense; if you could measure it, it would be nothing.

In a car on the highway I can't hear it. In a kitchen with a fan I can't hear it. At 2 a.m. in a bedroom it is the loudest thing in the county.

The first eight months were worse by a factor of fifty, and almost none of that was the sound. It was the panic about the sound. The thing about a noise inside your own head is there's no distance from it. You can't leave the room. And your brain, which is very good at threat detection, correctly identifies this as a threat it cannot escape, then runs that subroutine every ninety seconds for eight months.

I lost fourteen pounds. At the worst I slept three hours a night. I had two panic attacks, never having had one before, and both times was sure it was my heart.

An ENT who was kind ordered an audiogram, told me there was mild high-frequency loss in that ear, that there's no cure, that it's permanent, and gave me a pamphlet. He was not wrong about any of it and I hated him for a year.

What helped, in order: habituation therapy with an audiologist who specialized in it — essentially training your brain to stop flagging it as important. Sound enrichment at night, not masking, which I tried first and which made it worse, but low-level broadband noise that gives the brain something else to do.

Cutting caffeine after noon, which I resisted for two years out of stubbornness and which mattered more than I want to admit. And one sentence, the most useful thing anybody said: it's not getting louder, you're getting more afraid.

What didn't help: six supplements. Acupuncture, three sessions, pleasant, nothing. And forums, which I read compulsively the first year and which were the most actively harmful thing I did, because the people who habituate stop posting. Online you only hear from the people still in the fire.

Where I am: I hear it right now. I'm aware of it maybe fifteen times a day instead of constantly. I sleep fine, with a fan. I can sit in a restaurant. I wear earplugs at anything loud and I've become the guy who hands out earplugs at weddings and I don't apologize anymore.

What it cost that I haven't said to anyone: two years of my marriage were worse because of this and my wife absorbed all of it. I was short-tempered, frightened and self-absorbed from 2019 to 2021 and she carried the household, both kids, and me.

I apologized once, badly, in 2022. I've never properly thanked her, because every time I start it comes out as another conversation about my ears, and she has had enough conversations about my ears.

One more thing, for the people in month three, reading this at 2 a.m., looking for someone who got better. I'm not better. The sound is identical. But the version of me that was dying in 2020 is gone, and I did not believe that was possible, and nobody could have convinced me of it, and I'm writing it down anyway on the chance that it lands.