I am not a doctor. I am someone who has lived with tinnitus for more than three decades and has spent a long time reading the research carefully. If that is the kind of answer you are looking for, ask away.
And if you do not have a question at all — if you simply want to set down what this has been like, and have someone who understands it actually read it — send me that instead. You do not owe me a question.
Part of what makes tinnitus so heavy is how private it is. Nobody else can hear it. People who care about you run out of things to say. Doctors who cannot fix it sometimes stop engaging with it. Being heard properly, by someone who has been in it a long time, turns out to matter more than most of the advice floating around.
Some people want to be heard by one person, not by the world. That is a complete reason to write, and it is what happens by default here: nothing you send is published unless you specifically ask me to publish it. If you want this to go no further than the two of us, it will not.
Every month I answer a few of these in the issue, and sometimes I publish a story on its own — only ever from people who ticked the box saying I could, and never with your name on it unless you tell me otherwise. If a question is one I cannot answer well, I will say so rather than guess.
Take your time and email it. A long story is often easier written the way you’d write a letter — over a few sittings, in whatever you normally use. Send it to hello@tinnitusmonthly.com and it reaches exactly the same place.
Or just talk. Record a voice memo on your phone — five minutes, no script, however it comes out — and email me the file. For a lot of people this is far easier than typing, and honestly it’s often better: you say things out loud that you’d edit out in writing.
Whichever way you send it, the same promise holds. Nothing is published unless you tell me it can be.