“If anyone loudly blesses their neighbour early in the morning, it will be t​aken as a curse.” Proverbs 17:24

Further Reading

• Inclusion
• Bricks and Stone Temples
• Disability or Neurodiversity?

Quiet in the Library!

The world treats a lot of the things I find easy as unusual or difficult. And it doesn’t make much allowance for things that I find really difficult but most people don’t have a problem with, like people speaking quietly on the other side of a library.

I was at Bible college with a lovely chap called Steven. He was a big, very friendly, very gentle, very enthusiastic guy who was often a bit loud. Because I don’t cope well with noise, I experienced him as intensely annoying. And he’d probably have been devastated to know that. (Sorry Steven if you’re reading this!)

Proverbs 27:14 explains the situation well. “If anyone loudly blesses their neighbour early in the morning, it will be t​aken as a curse.”

It came to a head one day in the library. Steven was chatting to someone some distance away. I was trying to work, but unable to filter out the noise of his conversation, which he kept prolonging more than was necessary. Eventually I could bear it no more and loudly threatened to throw him out of the window if he didn’t shut up. That’s really not how people should behave at Bible college! 

Actually, neither of those are how people should behave at Bible college, but most people would probably side with Steven. Maybe his expectations for how much noise people could cope with were entirely reasonable on the basis of what most people are like. Maybe 95+% of people could cope with his chatting. I know I used to spend ages trying out different places to work, trying to find somewhere that was quiet enough for me to be able to concentrate, and I would pass dozens of people who seemed to be concentrating well in places that were much too noisy for me.

If I had been more aware back then of how bad I am at filtering out background noise compared to most people and if I’d recognised it as a disability at that point, I could have asked the college or university authorities, and they would have been obliged to make reasonable accommodations for me. Perhaps in a space with a soft floor, no leaf-blowers within 200m, a strict ban on crisp packets and people excluded for two weeks per sentence spoken, including enquiries. Or maybe they’d just have sent me to the basement of the nearby Science library and told me to wear headphones, which is what I eventually did. It didn’t have natural light, but it did have a carpet, not many users, and even fewer who wanted to talk.

Or maybe I’d have realised much earlier that a decent set of noise-cancelling headphones is a worthwhile investment!