You know how sometimes there is a sound that just gets to you? The obvious example is nails on a chalkboard, but honestly that doesn’t really bother me all that much. We were discussing this over the weekend and it turns out that there are certain sounds that you can’t handle, but everybody’s sounds are different.

For Ron, it was the sound of a knife cutting on a wooden cutting board. For my mom, it was cutting cardboard with scissors. Sara can’t handle the sound of chalk writing on anything, or even touching chalk for that matter (“it’s just so dry!”). She has the same problem with the sound of someone writing with a pencil. As for me, it’s the sound of nails on the felty fabric on the inside of the roof of your car.

So at least mine is something normal and everybody else has totally bizarre reactions.

Ugh, man I tell you, it makes me shudder just to write it down. I can’t even picture the roof of the car in my head without a reaction. Even weirder then the fact that everybody has some strange sound that affects them, apparently hearing the sound affects everybody differently.

For Ron, it gets him right in the back of his shoulders. Mom gets little shivers on her arms. Sara gets goose bumps (even just talking about it – she demonstrated). Mine makes my back teeth feel funny.

It’s hilarious how everybody can talk about their own hang-ups and reactions very seriously, but everybody else’s sounds ridiculous.

So what is your sound? And how does it affect you?