Reframing My Suffering
I feel this topic sums up this year for me so far.
My ear is still not good, and while I thought it was about to disappear it seemingly got way worse again after a night of using earplugs — welp.
But, what I want to talk about is perhaps something else more people can relate to, at least if you live near noisy neighbors, and have (c)PTSD, neurodivergence or similar.
I am someone who has been unfortunate with my neighbors most of my life, and on top of that I am hyper-sensitive to sounds. I’ve also lived in an apartment most of my life, so I’ve never really had the fortune to experience complete silence and freedom as someone living in a house would.
Combine those things and you’ve got a nice recipe for trauma development, anxiety, depression — especially so if it’s ongoing for not only weeks or months, but for years.
When I first moved out I never had issues with being too sensitive to neighbors making sounds or being loud. Sure, it was annoying when neighbors blasted music well into the night every day, but I dealt with it and just got annoyed at worst.
However, without noticing, it suddenly developed into anxiety one day, and that anxiety later on turned into actual trauma and hypervigilance towards most sounds it seems, which makes everyday sounds suddenly go from annoying to triggering.
This condition has caused me to literally flee my apartment countless and countless of times, as otherwise I’d be self harming or straight up planning out my suicide.
Eventually it lead me to “fleeing” from my last apartment as I got a new upstairs neighbor which for the first month — until I told her and she did it less frequently — blasted music for hours a day for at least 4-5 days a week, on top of stomping and walking chronically and dropping things on the floor like bags or metal pipes or whatever well into the night, chronically waking me up.
My home was no longer my home, it was no longer safe.
On top of this there was chronic road noise, lawn movers, other neighbors playing music, scooters, drug dealings etc that further compounded on the chronic stress I had while living there.
Eventually I found a new apartment with better soundproofing and hopefully less noise.
Upon first inspection prior to moving in it seemed “fine”, and for the first day(!) I was at home it was seemingly quiet.
However, literally the next day — my second day after moving there — I heard loud music blasting..
I figured maybe it was an every now and the thing and tried not to react too strongly, but even then, after ~2 hours and starting to have a headache from the loud music I had enough and started playing my portable Bluetooth speaker louder, which instantly made whoever made that music turn theirs down to not as audible.
I was already starting to worry that this would be another apartment filled with neighbors blasting music non-stop again, but thankfully it did seem to be an every now and then thing for the first few months of being here.
As much as I hate noises from other people, I can tolerate and accept someone having an occasional party or whatever, likewise I might watch a loud action movie here and there. It’s an apartment after all, not a prison. (Though it certainly does feel like that way too often for me, lol.)
However..
I had some bad luck in the recent weeks which caused me to perceive what was (finally) a new safe apartment as yet another place of anxiety, fear, dread — having my PTSD constantly triggered again.
One recent weekend my two neighbors blasted their stereos for 3 days straight in the evening for multiple hours, and then the next weekend they did it yet again, but one neighbor decided to keep going until Sunday that weekend 2:30AM because why not — fuck your neighbors am I right? /s
Because of said incidents I ended up being EXTREMELY hypervigilant in my current apartment, chronically on edge and bordering on a panic-attack for the next two to three weeks afterwards!!
But the funny thing is, barring a random evening (again ㄱ_ㄱ;) after those two weekends it was actually quiet.. Yet I was still on edge, and not only that, I was still angry and annoyed the entire time I was at home or outside of home..
Instead of being able to finally relax, I was essentially constantly reliving the traumas I had due to the noise of said neighbors — only it was inside of my head instead of actually happening in reality again.
I was constantly in a state of awaiting it happening again, and I begun being incredibly triggered by my own HDD rattling, low frequencies in music, shows or games again, thinking: “THIS IS IT, IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN!!”
Not to mention the road noise outside from the cars passing by all day long, often by revving their engines, or simply from the terrible acoustics in the city itself and our apartment complex courtyard, which eerily sounds similar to the tones and notes the music from my neighbor had.
This simply wasn’t sustainable long term, and even though I could flee again, who’s to say I wouldn’t have the same situation happen yet again, just in another apartment complex?
After all, it literally only takes one person to ruin it for the other countless tenants*.
Interestingly enough, I noticed how similar sounds while being at other people’s homes or at venues wouldn’t bother me as much, if at all..
This made me wonder if there was perhaps some neurocognitive retraining I could do to perhaps be less on edge and less triggered by those sounds, and thus relieve some of the stress I was putting myself through?
I ended up searching around if other people had gone through someone similar, and eventually found a woman, who shared her own experiences and how she mostly overcame those same struggles pertaining to her neighbors.1
I took what she said to heart, wrote down some post-it notes (I really do love them) and started practicing remembering certain phrases and their meaning:
“It’s your thinking about the thing, not the thing itself [causing the suffering].”
“You are safe and it will pass.”
“Practice acceptance. Don’t be a slave to your thoughts.”
At first I practiced those phrases in my own head over and over almost all the time as my anxiety and hypervigilance was at an all time high, and I needed some way to cope while at home.
Gradually over the next few weeks I went from rehearsing those phrases multiple times a day to only doing it once every few days or so, but still ramping up the repetition of the phrases whenever I noticed my anxiety and fear spiking again.
While I still have fear and anxiety of the sound potentially coming again, it’s more of a thing in the back of my mind that at times slips through to the front, but at least it went from being something that was making my life a literal hell to something that — while still bothering me a lot — is something that I can deal with and cope for now.
I’ve also decided to try and restart keto again and might ditch the caffeine (again, again, again) in case that might help further, as I know keto was a big lifesaver in my past living situations.
Being in a state of ketosis would in effect simply take the edge off from my suffering, making it easier top cope with whatever I was going through.
Caffeine as you probably know has the tendency to exaggerate anxiety, especially when it’s not coupled with l-theanine as it is when you consume caffeinated teas.
With the sun peeping out more and it become warmer I am also able to exercise outside a lot more, too, which also helps a lot with regulating the nervous system.
While I know I won’t ever be perfectly at peace and at home living in an apartment, at least I hope this can help me not dread being at home as much, especially with my overactive mind that loves to make a big deal out of everything really easily.
Thanks for reading!
*In my old apartment the soundproofing and noise conductivity of the building was so bad you could have a neighbor 5 apartments over be loud in my apartment. Doing some rough, simple math, that one neighbor could potentially annoy ~40-60 tenants due to his loud music!!
Even a big lawn mover 200m away on the other side of the street would somehow have its low frequency vibration penetrate the building, causing a somewhat loud “hummmm” sound the entire time it was going!!
Low frequencies really do travel in some odd ways at times, and quite far to boot!