The Volume Knob Is Broken

People love to tell me my volume knob is broken. The lights are too bright, the room is too loud, the tag in my shirt feels like a cheese grater, and someone, gently, helpfully, explains that it’s just like a volume knob stuck too high. There. Tidy. A little broken dial in an old radio. I understand the metaphor completely. I also live underneath it every day, and it has never quite fit, so let me tell you why.

A knob implies there’s just one of them. One dial, one setting, one tidy place where the problem lives. That’s not how it goes. It isn’t a single channel nudged up too far. It’s the lights and the noise and the fabric and the smell and the temperature, all of it arriving at once, all of it loud, with no master control up top minding the mix. There’s no one knob. There’s a whole panel, and none of the dials take my calls.

A knob also implies it’s broken in the simple sense, stuck, mechanical, the kind of thing you’d fix with a small screwdriver and a free afternoon. It isn’t broken like that. Nothing got stuck. My nervous system has simply decided that an ordinary room is a threat, and it commits to the part, treating a normal weekday level of noise like a fire alarm and a friendly overhead light like an interrogation lamp. That’s not a faulty part. That’s the system working very hard, on purpose, around the clock, and there’s nothing in there to reach in and turn down.

And here’s the part that gets me. A knob invites the worst advice going, because if it’s just a knob, then why don’t I simply turn it down? You can watch the question form on people’s faces. They’ve handed me a metaphor with its own wrong solution built right in, as if the trouble is that I never thought to reach over and lower it. As if I’ve been standing next to the fix this whole time, ignoring it out of stubbornness, when there’s no knob to turn and there never was.

The metaphor makes the whole thing sound charming, too, and charming it is not. A broken volume knob is a quirk, a funny little thing about a beat-up car stereo. What’s actually happening is that I leave gatherings early because the noise turns physical, that I eye fluorescent stores with real dread, that a scratchy seam can run a whole morning off the rails. None of that is a cute mechanical hiccup. Dressing it up as one shrinks it down to something tidy and manageable, which is the one thing it stubbornly refuses to be.

So no, my volume knob isn’t broken. There’s no knob. There’s a nervous system doing far too much with everything the world sends in, and no dial anywhere in here that switches that off. I’m not asking for a better metaphor. I’m asking you to retire the one that makes an ordinary day sound like a small repair I keep forgetting to book.