Auditory Processing Struggles

I didn't realize I had auditory processing struggles until the last year. I had assumed my struggles to understand people speaking in noisy venues, speaking with pronounced accents, or speaking to me when I was stressed, was due to me having some form of hearing loss. It wasn't out of the question. I have been struck in the head before, and I suffered temporary hearing loss and tinnitus from the blow. I also ruptured an ear drum due to an untreated ear infection in my teens. However, when I had my hearing tested, my hearing fell within normal range. In the course of learning more about autism, I learned that we can tend towards needing a bit more time to process sensory input and information, and suddenly the mystery of my hearing struggles made better sense. Loud noises that are high pitched create a screech-like feedback in my ears. If there are lots of competing sounds, like when you are at a crowded, noisy restaurant, I cannot separate the individual conversations from one another. It becomes one big cacophony of shrill noise bombarding me with a wall of sounds that I cannot discern. People who speak quickly, particularly if they have a strong accent, sound to my ears like someone murmuring gibberish. I know they are speaking clearly. I know they are speaking the same language as me. And I know from painful experience that making them repeat themselves or speak more loudly will not render their speech more intelligible to my ears. I smile and nod a lot, or tell people I am partially deaf. That seems more comprehensible to the majority of people than me trying to explain in a non-offensive manner that their accent is impossible for me to understand because of the way my brain works. What are your processing struggles? What are your hacks to get around the challenges they present? image used is a pin that can be purchased from the page Doodlepeople: https://m.facebook.com/doodlepeoplexo/