Every f•cking new-years. And days, and days before. And, now, again, one night later, and the f•cking fireworks are going, again. This "Silvester" tradition is one of the things I hate most about living in Germany.

I empathise with people who have explosion-related PTSD and I also empathise with cats and dogs and other animals and always have but – f•ck – what about ND people?

Do NT people not actually realise that, for some of us, this sensory abuse is actually torturous? We aren't just "babies" being scared by something unknown: we're just experiencing a physiological reaction to a sensory stimulus that we cannot change no matter how well we understand the mechanism?

Last year (2023-24) was worse, I guess: I went basically crazy and needed to be taken in hand.

I thought I'd actually been handling this time round rather well. Yesterday, I even went out the house while the sun was shining (brightly) and the fireworks weren't yet so bad. (Although I did joke to my partner that we should be carrying a boom-box with the Saving Private Ryan theme-song going as we walked back across a muddy field.)

I played two sets of tennis to try to spend any pent up adrenaline and took medication. That often fails to induce any effect at all but my meds worked alright, last night.

But, now, it's started up, again. I don't particularly want to take meds again, two nights in a row. And it's only 18h00 so it wouldn't make sense for a few hours, yet, anyway.

This seems so ableist and so useless. Dogs, cats, people with explosion-related PTSD and me: we should all form a class-action. Or a mob.