Can I talk about Auditory Processing Disorder for a sec? I eventually wanna do a https://invisibleup.com/articles/27/  esque piece about this, but I wanna at least blab on Twitter about it first. Because I'm fairly confident I have it, and it's a PAIN to deal with.

So APD is a disorder that makes it difficult to process speech. For me, I find things like lectures, conversations, voice chats, television, etc. very hard to follow for long periods of time. I'm okay at first, but I get very fatigued very quickly and it all turns into mush.

Song lyrics are another thing I struggle a lot with. Most times I don't even recognise lyrics beyond blatant choruses. I recognize that there is speech, I can recognize individual words, but not *meaning*. It often sounds a lot like this to me:

I'm making this thread because I've noticed that I've had 90% of my interpersonal interaction lately over text chats. At most I'd have about 30 minutes to an hour per day I needed to listen to others. Now I'm in a position where that's gone up, and it's pretty rough adjusting.

I got out of a voice chat with friends about an hour ago and I absolutely noticed myself going from being totally okay to bring completely and totally fed up with trying to listen to others over the span of like two hours. I could recognize words, but barely meaning by the end.

But I CAN watch professionally produced movies (about two hours), and I CAN watch YouTube videos with proper subtitles for longer periods. And even after I can't process audio, I can go back to text and chat things up totally fine.

I've also been doing some research, and people with APD often find it much easier to use ASL or other sign languages *if they know it*. It's *auditory* processing disorder; text and ASL are visual. I kinda tried to learn ASL myself, but I couldn't self-study that effectively.

So, it would be really nice if we taught people sign language in schools? It's nice even for the hearies, because sometimes you just can't talk. And it would be nice if more people knew about auditory processing disorder, and if accomodations could be made for people with it.

I'm at a weird spot where I'm definitely not deaf or HoH, and I can do most daily things just fine, but I can't do things like college lectures or long meetings without completely losing track and tuning out. And nobody's writing any of this up, you gotta take notes!

And it's not super great for career networking either. I cannot do cocktail parties, I cannot do job fairs, I cannot do professional conferences, I cannot go to the pub... Too many people talking, too much information to process, too much noise.

If I could just turn off my hearing on demand and just have captions for everything, that would be fantastic. For instance, I struggle with directions given orally, but I can usually read a list once and get a very clear picture.

I guess I'll end this thread with a Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder