Flasz On Film

The horror. The horror.

For years I have lived under a tyrannical oppression, a jackboot pressing against my throat, keeping me down, bound and hopeless. Questioning my humanity, doubting what’s real and what isn’t… Asking myself most fundamental questions. What have I done to deserve this? Whose karmic debt am I repaying? Is there no end to my ordeal?

The horror.

The horror.

The horror.

I have dealt with my wife’s snoring for years. Look, I love her to bits. She’s my best friend and the mother to our only daughter. But holy Christ on a stick does she snore like an industrial leaf blower. In fact, she has always snored, but over the years her skills improved, and the volume of noise produced by her — ostensibly with minimal effort too — has increased considerably. In fact, she might be a genetic freak of nature because in contrast to most people, she is capable of producing potentially criminal levels of noise pollution completely irrespective of her position in bed. She snores on her back. She snores on her side. She even snores when she sleeps face down, perhaps intuitively attempting to muffle her own noises by projecting them into a pillow.

I have tried everything. Gently massaging her back only subdues the noise production for minutes. Unsolicited spooning doesn’t do anything. It is essentially akin to hugging an idling V8 plucked straight out of a 1970 Dodge Challenger I continue to dream about driving at least once before internal combustion engines are eventually outlawed. I convinced her to try nasal strips. Nasal sprays. Multiple brands. Meditation. Candles. Think of a snoring remedy and I will tell you I have tried them all. Stuff’s serious because sleeping next to my own partner is probably something prisoners in Guantanamo would see as a serious violation of The Geneva Convention.

I tried moving out to the sofa. Can’t reasonably fit there. I tried kicking her out to the sofa instead. Doesn’t work either because within literally five minutes the guilt would settle in and I’d immediately drag her back to bed, as I don’t want her to suffer on the back of something she has very little say over. In fact, whenever I evacuated to the sofa, she’d do the same for me. You can’t have a good night sleep either way.

However, the tide has finally turned when — completely lost, on my knees and with hands thrown in the air, hoping for celestial deities to step in and deliver me from my seemingly never-ending suffering — I heard Marcus Aurelius himself channelled through my own inner monologue.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.”

His words boomed in my ears for minutes, echoing and reverberating with providence. Of course. All this time I have been looking for solutions where there weren’t any. And I know this philosophy. I am intimately familiar with the mindset of not trying to force the world to conform to the immutable me, but instead to always try to shape myself and prepare myself to face the immutable world. Maybe I cannot fix my wife’s snoring. Perhaps this is a feature, not a bug. In fact, I know it is a feature because her mother snores too. I hear it loud and clear every time we stay over. It must be in the genes.

I have no control over how the noise is produced. But I oversee how it is received. I cannot pretend it isn’t there; believe me, I have tried. But I can physically block it from interacting with my brain.

I went online and bought foam earplugs capable of taking out 38 dB worth of noise. I have never been too sure of what that actually means because the volume scale is logarithmic, but I can tell you that 38 dB is a lot of dB. I got them delivered, shmooshed them into my ears and I slept like a toddler. Six hours of completely uninterrupted sleep, for the first time in years. I felt like a young god.

And here’s the best part, despite asking the wife to wake me up in case I don’t hear the alarm in the morning, my brain has attuned itself to this new predicament immediately and I somehow hear the alarm clock the second it pipes up. Without fail. I was worried I would be driven insane by the constant and ever-present background noise of my own tinnitus I have been struggling with for years. Not a problem either.

Don’t change the world, change yourself to adjust to the world. Buy earplugs.

And this, my dear reader, is how I turned a simple “I couldn’t sleep because my wife snores, so I bought earplugs and it’s OK now” into eight hundred words.

In the voice of Borat: great success.

I have found my strength in earplugs. Thanks, Marcus.

This article was originally published on Medium.Com on 26th June 2024.