Before my accident, I liked going to clubs or places with loud music.
It did not bother me.
It was just part of the atmosphere.

After the accident, that changed a lot.
Between the hearing loss and the cochlear implant, loud music started to stress me out.
Not only because of the volume,
but because of everything that comes with it:
people talking at the same time,
mixed noise,
the effort of trying to understand anything inside that chaos.

For a long time, going to places like that exhausted me quickly.
I would start feeling uncomfortable,
overloaded,
as if instead of enjoying myself I was only enduring it.

Because of that, I stopped seeing those places as something fun.
They no longer felt natural to me.
They felt difficult.

Today I went to a wedding.
The music was extremely loud,
there were a lot of people,
and in theory it was exactly the kind of place that would have stressed me out before.

But I realized something:
loud music does not bother me the way it used to.

I do not mean that now everything feels easy,
or that hearing in those environments is simple.
But I clearly felt that something had changed.
I did not go into that immediate state of tension.
I did not feel like leaving just to escape the noise.

In fact, I had a good time.

And that surprised me.
Because it was not something I had noticed little by little.
It became obvious today.
As if I suddenly saw an adaptation that had been happening for a while without me fully noticing it.

I guess that is how it works sometimes.
You change slowly,
you adapt slowly,
and you do not notice it until one day you are in the middle of a place that used to weigh heavily on you
and you discover that it no longer feels the same.

I do not know if this means I have completely moved past those kinds of environments.
I do not think it is that simple.
But it did make one thing clear to me:
I have adapted more than I thought.

And for me, that is already a lot.