Oh, I can feel the pain all the way.... We have quite a few veterans here living kind of ok lives with severe tinnitus. With severe I mean non maskable, reactive (all over the place), high pitched dentist drill, or cicada like tinnitus.
First of, I am not trying to convince anybody of anything here. I know it´s pointless. It took me many year not to instinctively just roll out what the veterans had to say. I just know my life was over and I stuck to that for well over three years.
I just urge you not use your last efforts to completely roll out that you could have some dignity back. We all need hope. Do not be too hard on yourself. Just let the time work for you. Sadly we are not talking months, it´s more likely years or many years. How I managed finely is hard to describe. I guess for me it was the f-ng limbic part of the brain that finely gave up alerting panic or I just got tolerant to all the adrenaline and cortisol that I was pumped up with.
For me it was kind of that I had to re-learn all basic things in life, over and over and over again.
Falling a sleep with screaming ears.
Reading a simple text with screaming ears.
Moving on to reading book with screaming ears.
Watching TV with screaming ears.
My own thinking with screaming ears.
Paying attention to someone else with screaming ears.
Hiking in the woods with screaming ears.
To see my wife and kids to be happy with screaming ears and not compulsively thinking "they do not understand".
This list could be long...
I had a lot setbacks and tinnitus is sill very much my enemy but I do not fear it anymore. Sometimes I can get glitch of my old me thinking that this is f-ing insane sound to live with but I just observe it and go back to where I were.
In my early days
@Markku sent some videos with Allan Whats. I am forever grateful for that.
Hugs.