White noise rain8/12/2023 I squeezed my eyes shut and it was almost like not being alive at all. The noise kept everything more or less the same, obliterating my nerves. When I stood on the tube grasping the clammy handrail at 7am, my heart rarely hammered as it once had. The panic attacks I was accustomed to became fewer and fewer. When the rain noises didn’t seem to quite block out my surroundings any more I moved on to pure white noise, which combines aural frequencies to produce a gratifyingly neutral effect. It not only drowns out my thoughts, but doesn’t actually allow them to exist at all for the time that I’m listening It started doing so there at my desk when I was writing, and then the tube to whatever office I was temping at, and the bus from that office to a terrible date, and then again on the dawn journey home. I had complained to a friend that my bedroom allowed all the noise of my household into it when I was trying to work and she suggested I listen to rain sounds. That was when I began to listen to white noise. How there was never a moment of any day when you were alone until you climbed into your bed still sticky from fumes and the terrible food you conceded to eat on the journey back – weeping pathetically into your gummy M&S wrap – and how that aloneness, though you’d longed for it all day, would feel so embarrassing and awful. How it was normal to live with five people instead of one or two, and how they might all be near you when you wanted to make a cup of tea at midnight. It wasn’t as though I had moved from a village – Dublin is a major city, after all, and I’d spent six years there after leaving home – but I was not prepared for what it felt like to constantly be physically shoved against strangers, how you could hear their mouth noises and video games and stupid voice notes all the time. I worked temp jobs, I sub-let my bedroom, I relied on the generosity of my best friend to top up my Oyster card when I had nothing left. I left Ireland in a hurry, with no good plans in place, no real reason to have come, and so lived for two years in a constant stressful flux. I first came to white noise shortly after I moved to London from Dublin. I had listened to nothing all year as much as I had listened to flat soundscapes designed to soothe infants. Not just White Noise – “White Noise For Babies”. But there it was, above the other great heroes of my year, Leonard Cohen and Ariana Grande. I could spend the rest of my life contorting my brain to view tagged pictures of myself, attempting to understand how others see me. Like a dog returning to its vomit, nothing fascinates me more than my own alien excretions. L ate last year Spotify presented me with my Top 100 most listened to tracks of 2018 and, as ever when I’m presented with some unknown version of myself, I couldn’t wait to analyse it.
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