I really dislike the shape of my ear. It makes it difficult for me to use earbuds like I assume normal people do. The cartilage in my ear doesn’t allow enough space for the earbud to sit properly. So, anytime I put an earbud in, it doesn’t seem to fit the way it’s supposed to. Apple AirPods, which have a large body and seem to shape the speaker to point a bit more forward, don’t sit very well in my ear at all. There’s nothing in my ear to hold them in place. The little bits of cartilage that it seems like normal people with normal ears have either don’t exist in my ear or are pointed in a different direction, making Apple EarPods not fit and sit properly.

Traditional earbuds, like the ones with tips you insert into your ear canal, also have difficulty fitting normally. My right ear has a smaller ear canal than my left ear, so I have to use totally different ear tip sizes, and they never fit quite right. The AirPod Pro earbuds that I have probably fit the best out of all the earbuds I own, but only because I use aftermarket foam inserts that conform to the shape of my ear. Each one is a different size, and even then there’s some kind of gap around the one for my left ear which messes with the noise cancellation and makes it less effective than it should be. I’m constantly having to adjust them because the cartilage in my ear does not hold the pods properly, and there’s always a drag pulling them down even though they’re more firmly affixed with the foam than with silicone tips.

On top of that, due to the shape of my ear, the stems on the AirPods don’t sit like they do in a normal person’s ear. In a normal person’s ear, the stems seem to point down and there is a gap in their ear cartilage that allows the stem to sit in exactly the right place. In my ears, because of how the pod body has to sit inside my ear to connect to my ear canal, the pod stems stick out like tusks growing out of the side of my head. It looks really odd and makes me self-conscious when I’m out in public and forget I’m wearing them.

It’s not just Apple devices that have this problem. Even with simpler earbuds, there are challenges since my ears don’t have space for normal earbud speakers. Another issue is that my ear canals are oriented differently than most people’s. My doctor told me during a regular checkup that my ear canals lead upward into my head, which is apparently an odd design for ear canals. This explains why even when an earbud is secured in what should be a proper mechanism, they tend to fall out rather than stay in.

Lately, I’ve been wearing Soundcore earbuds to sleep using their sleep buds so that I can fall asleep to an audiobook or some music. These have been the best earbuds I’ve found so far for wearing to bed; they cause the least problems while keeping my audio private when I fall asleep. However, over the last couple of days, this right earbud has started to irritate my ear and I’ve noticed it has been digging into my skin and causing it to bleed slightly. So now I have to stop using them for a few days to let it heal, which is really inconvenient for me.

In all, I wish my ears were just a slightly different shape that would allow normal earbuds to work or maybe some manufacturer would look upon this problem as an interesting one to solve and provide good sets of earbuds for these different purposes that would actually fit strange ear shapes.