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One night two years ago I was lying in bed when I began to hear a high-pitched, electronic hum. The scene that followed would be comical if it wasn’t so traumatic. I roamed around the house in my PJs, frantically pressing my ears against various electrical appliances. It took half an hour to realise the sound was coming from inside my own head.

I’d heard ringing in my ears before, rising then falling, like a one-note crescendo of an orchestra. As a kid I used to believe the myth it was the sound of dying ear cells, playing a swan song for a frequency I’d never hear again. This was different. This time, it didn’t stop.

Tinnitus is common, with a global burden similar to migraines. Fourteen per cent of adults experience tinnitus with 2% experiencing a severe form. It’s often triggered by age-related or noise-induced hearing loss, but I was only 36 and a trip to the audiologist revealed my hearing was perfect – the Kings Cross nightclubbing of my youth hadn’t come back to haunt me. Another trigger is stress.

The first few days after the ringing began felt increasingly claustrophobic. The alarm-like sound that no one else could hear followed me everywhere: to my writing desk, to coffee with a friend, into the shower and, worst of all, back into bed.

Tinnitus can be torturous for anyone, but for someone who worships the first birdcall breaking through a soundless dawn, who owns two dog-eared and underlined copies of Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence – an exquisite manifesto of solitude and quiet – it felt especially cruel.

My GP thought I might have an ear infection. I cried in her office, tears of relief. “I’ve never been so happy to have an infection,” I told her. She gave me drops, a thick mucousy liquid that blocked both ears and made the ringing significantly louder. My days were a constant battle against steadily rising panic. Meditation was useless, for obvious reasons.

I drove to the ocean and sat there for hours. The dull roar of whitewater drowned out the sound and, there, I could breathe. I took the sea back to bed with me, a 10-hour playlist of deep-blue bliss. I dreamed about waves, but also about a bright light piercing the fog of sleep.

The drops dried up. If there was an infection it was gone. Weeks passed, but the ringing remained. I fell down the research rabbit hole.

Like all chronic conditions, you could spend a lot of money on trying to find a fix: supplements, acupuncture, hypnosis, antidepressants (not as a cure but a way to cope). But the most common advice is to just try to ignore it. To learn to live with it.

Because here’s the most disconcerting thing about tinnitus: the sound doesn’t exist outside your perception of it. It’s a type of false alarm, created by your nervous systems and brain rather than an actual wave of sound in the air, and – like the way we aren’t bothered by our clothes brushing our skin all day long – the less you pay attention to it the less you hear it.

Trust me when I say this does not feel helpful, or at all believable, when a semi-trailer’s brakes have been squealing in your ears for two months. I raged, I cried, I begged the universe. I didn’t want to live with this. I couldn’t live with this. There had to be something physical happening to me that a professional could fix.

It took seven excruciating weeks to get into an ENT. He performed test after test in his office before turning to me with a stern but sympathetic look. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said. And there was something in his voice. It felt like a magic spell, or some kind of blessing. Stop fighting this, it told me, you’re already free.

Over the following months, slowly but surely, my tinnitus began to soften around the edges. Through both natural habituation and intentionally training my attention, my nervous system learned to focus on more important, beautiful and interesting things. Sometimes, while watching the sun rise or reading a book, I didn’t hear it at all.

These days, although tinnitus is still my near-constant companion, I’ve stopped wishing things were different. Because when you remove hope and fear, some suffering transforms into a kind of melancholic but peaceful surrender.

I didn’t think I could learn to live with tinnitus, but every day is more proof that I can.

Now when stress causes the ringing to spike, or if I listen too hard for a silence that isn’t there, I refocus my attention on something I love and the sound soon stops bothering me. My new version of tranquility returns.