I Have Super Powers

If you polled everybody who knows me in real life and asked them to think of the most annoying thing about me, and you discarded the most common answer of "caustic, self-absorbed jerkface," most people would probably come up with some variant of "mumbles a lot, can barely hear what he's saying."

Growing up, my older siblings and other people whose job it was to highlight my flaws would very often tell me to stop mumbling. A lot of times, I'll say something incredibly funny and anybody who isn't within four feet of me will see the other people laughing and say, "What, what did he say?"

I speak at a rather low volume. I won't deny that. There are various contributing factors to this, but key among them is the simple fact that I have super powers.

My hearing and vision are above average. My eyes see at a higher "framerate" than most people, and because of that I can often see things that other people aren't supposed to. No, not ghosts. Halogen lights have an unusual pulsing flicker going on all the time. Other people don't notice it, but to me, they tend to make everything look a little bit like a strobe light. This doesn't really bother me anymore, and it doesn't affect other people in any way more significant in that they occasionally don't understand when I try to explain why certain department stores give me headaches.

My hearing is what causes the most problems. I can hear slightly higher frequencies than are typical (those dog whistle things sound like a mosquito flying past my ear), but I also just generally hear better than most. Because of that, when I speak at a volume that seems appropriate for my superhero ears, nobody else can hear me.

If I talk at a volume other people seem to talk at, I feel like I'm shouting. To me, most people seem like they're shouting all the time.

I'm not alone in this. My sister seems to be the same. Her and I can have a conversation in public that, to any observer, looks like we're either whispering or somehow reading eachother's lips. Somehow she learned to speak at a reasonable volume around other people, and I did not.

So, I get a lot of "what?"s and "stop mumbling"s. After a lifetime of this, I've grown to become pretty sensitive about being asked to repeat myself. I hate it. If I tell a joke (and if my mouth is open, I'm telling a joke) and somebody asks me to repeat it because they didn't hear my subsonic vocalizations, I almost always have to stop and let a bubbling range simmer down before then deciding if I can handle the shame of repeating myself for an audience of non-superhumans.

I can't decide if my intense negative reaction to being asked to repeat myself is a product of my sense of humor, or some kind of shame that I'd spoken incorrectly in the first place. As I've [over-]established, I make a particularly large deal out of being spontaneously funny. I don't tell "jokes," as it were, as much as I just say funny things appropriate to the situation. People tell me I should be a comedian at times, and I tell them that I never could, because comedians have to tell the same jokes over and over, and I feel like I've failed as a human if I use the same line for a laugh more than once.

If I crack off a one-liner and a few people didn't hear it, my repetition of will have lost half of its oomph because the context changed.

Or, as I said, it could be the shame. I have a weird mental self-defense protocol that tries to stop me from thinking about, or being aware of any negative aspect of myself. From 6th grade and all through high school, whenever someone made a fat joke to or about me, my brain would lock down for a moment and go through a little process of, "wait, he wasn't talking about me, because I'm not fat. He was talking about another guy, a guy who isn't here, because he's in another universe, but he looks like me, but he isn't me, but-- hey, pumpkin pie!"

It never actually hit me that I was fat until about a year ago when my doctor (of all people ) told me I could lose twenty pounds (or lose sixty pounds, as I eventually did).

Without the context of a joke to wash it away, there was no way my stupid brain could divert my attention from that.

And now that I'm working in an office where I sometimes have to tell people things that aren't jokes, them not being able to hear me becomes an actual problem. Only now do I have a volume problem that I cant rationalize away as other people simply not having super-hearing.

So now I have to remember, whenever I open my mouth, to talk about 20% louder than I think I should, even though it feels incredibly wrong.

I think I need a lozenge.