Please (stop needing everyone to) be quiet!

My father used to yell when we were being loud.

"You're making so much noise!"

Well, it was more like a loudly-expressed, exasperated observation than yelling, though he did yell about other things.

I didn't get it.

Now, I have the same issue. The louder things are, the more stressed I am. (Unless it's Queen on the car radio.) I'm not talking about kids being loud in the car when I'm trying to drive in pouring rain. I'm just talking about normal loudness. Like the TV being loud, or the radio, when someone is trying to talk to me. A half hour in our van, in summer, when the only way to keep cool is to have the windows all the way down, is awful. I sometimes want to talk to someone, but I'd just have to yell and then probably repeat myself.

Why does this bother me? Is it my father's legacy?

Years ago, a friend and I did a learning style inventory which promised to tell whether we were kinesthetic, auditory or visual, only unlike others, it didn't just tell which area we preferred; it told which was our primary modality, which was hidden and which was sacred. I was KAV. I am kinesthetic in the front, which for me means that if my overtaxed bra is too stretched out or my sock seam is over my toe the wrong way, an immediate rectification is the only way I can keep functioning. I am visual in the back. That is my sacred modality. Anything visual either needs to be perfect or catgegorized as unimportant. In other words, if I purposely create something visual, like the color of my kitchen, it must be perfect, or if something's purpose is to be beautiful, like our garden, it bugs me if something is awry. However, the color that had already been in my kitchen before I painted it was not offensive to me, it was just off my radar.

My hidden area, the "middle", is auditory. The middle area is critical; it's a person's makeup. So if something auditory does not jive with my... rhythems, is a good way to describe it, it could potentially shake my very bones apart. This is why my daughter's screamo music lasts mere moments on the car radio and why my ex-husband knew when to start counting seconds until the jam session at the end of Free Bird would be shut off.

So can I draw an imaginary line in my soul from my annoyance with some kinds of loudness to my father (that's my real father, if you read my first post) and then dismiss this along with the other crap I inherited from him? It would be much easier if I could handle lots of noise without my bones shaking apart (yes, that's a repeated image but that's how it feels to me), especially until screamo is out of vogue and my boyfriend's four kids, three of whom are boys, get a little older.  When I overload on noise, I need quiet AND stillness to come back to center. Quiet AND stillness together are very hard to come by around here.

So I'll try it. As the little boy in Angels in the Outfield says, "It could happen." And if it doesn't, please be quiet!