lately whenever i talk to my friend via headset on the instant messenger, if she has it on speaker i will hear myself on the other side due to the delay. it's loud, too, almost like there's another person in the room trying to talk over me--a person with a really horrible, disgusting voice. it's also very distracting, so of course when this happens i have to point it out. sometimes she'll switch from speaker to headphones, and that clears it up right away; other times, though, it becomes really apparent that she finds this annoying and sometimes it comes to "yes, just deal with it" because she doesn't like switching to headphones. either way, hearing myself like that is just really really bad for the dysphoria. especially if it happens toward the end of the conversation, so there's no buffer of other things to take my mind off of it between hearing my own voice and being left alone to think about it. it's almost to the point where i'm afraid to talk on headset because i know it will eventually start to echo. but i don't know if it's reasonable to ask her to just always use the headphones (which she finds uncomfortable), especially when the echo doesn't start immediately and usually takes a while to kick in. but it always happens, just a matter of when, and it's always pretty upsetting when it finally does.
i feel stupid being such a wreck over something so small and simple, but i don't really have any good way of dealing with it. it doesn't help that i have to speak softly while we're on headset because of other people in the house, so what i hear is even worse because it's all high pitched and whispery and it kind of makes me want to throw up. but not talking at all isn't much of a compromise, because it gets hard for me to concentrate after a while of just sitting and typing in silence.
