Anyone who lives in New York knows you can’t avoid hearing more than you care to from your neighbors. It’s just a fact of life.
I’ve been fortunate in that my building was constructed in the 80’s, which means it doesn’t have the creaking floorboards and ghostly whispers of a pre-war brownstone, nor does it have the cheap drywall problem of a newer construction. In my eight years of living here, I haven’t made or received any noise complaints—that is, until this past December.
I was heading out to work when I found a note slipped under my door. Typed, no name. It declared that the banging coming from my apartment, which sounded like heavy objects dropping on the ceiling, had become unbearable to the point that their light fixture was threatening to fall.
I live alone. I don’t have kids. I wasn’t hammering or drilling or dropping dumbbells. Hoping to clear up the misunderstanding, I knocked on my downstairs neighbor’s door and assured him that if I knew what I was doing to cause the problem, I would stop, but nothing he described matched what I was doing. I wasn’t even home the Friday before Thanksgiving, a day he claimed was particularly bad.
There’s often a gap between what we intend to say and how the other person perceives what was said. What he heard was: This isn’t my problem. I have no way of explaining it. So either you’re making this up or hearing it from somewhere else.
Three weeks later, on December 30th, I hosted my first dinner party for seven friends to celebrate the end of the year. It was only the third time I had ever hosted a small gathering in my apartment (I wrote about it here). The next morning, I found another typed note under the door.
So many things about this note felt off to me (starting with “You’ll hate me for this…”). Why did he think I would deny I was at home? Why didn’t he just knock on my door when he came upstairs? Why, in the past, did he feel the need to leave his own apartment instead of trying to talk to me?
Even more puzzling, it didn’t mention what was actually happening in the apartment, what he must’ve heard when he listened at the door: people talking and laughing. Instead, he described banging and shaking, which I couldn’t explain. No one was jumping. No one was dancing. We were sitting around a table. The music was on a much lower volume than most people watch TV. No one was walking around in their shoes.
Being accused of something you have no way of explaining is a bewildering experience. I started to doubt my own reality. I thought, either he’s hallucinating or I’m sleepwalking. Either he’s the crazy one or I am.
I became extremely conscious of my movements through the apartment. Every time I made a sound that was mildly loud, e.g. storing pots and pans in the oven, I wondered if he could hear it. The first week of the new year, I slept poorly, waking up many times through the night, debating if I should get a deadbolt. I didn’t really think he was going to break in and murder me. But I had no way of predicting his behavior because his experience was so far from my reality and his way of handling the situation was baffling to me.
Fortunately, a Twitter mutual was hosting a “Read, Rest, Renewal” retreat the first weekend in January. It was just what I needed: an escape from the claustrophobic walls of my apartment and my paranoia. On the retreat, I told my story to J who offered an explanation that opened up my perspective.
Maybe what my neighbor was describing was what he was experiencing, rather than what he was hearing. If someone is very sensitive to noise, laughter and voices at 2 a.m. might feel like banging and shaking (also the symptoms of a migraine). When he sent the first letter, he was probably convinced I knew what I was doing to cause the noise, and all it would take for me to stop was to understand the impact it had on him. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing to produce the sounds he mentioned, not realizing he might be describing a psychological, rather than a physical, experience.
As someone who’s conflict avoidant, typing a letter and slipping it under my door probably felt safe to him. On the other hand, what felt like a normal response to me—knocking on his door to have a face-to-face conversation—might’ve struck him as aggressive and confrontational. Meanwhile, the tone of his second letter chilled me.
This might sound like a strange situation, but conflict of this nature is all too common in relationships. One person’s experience doesn’t match the other person’s, and so they have a hard time reconciling their differences and adjusting their behaviors to accommodate each other’s needs. One person focuses more on facts, the other on emotional impact. One person communicates directly, the other indirectly. They think they’re speaking the same language and using the same frame of reference, but they’re not. When they’re unable to see eye-to-eye, they vilify the other person, which breeds more mistrust and suspicion and sabotages your own mental wellbeing.
We had each made the worst assumptions about the other’s motives. He thought I was lying about the noise, while I was starting to wonder if he was psycho and trying to frame me. Most of my friends would’ve felt disturbed by the situation, but that’s because we share similar worldviews and lifestyles. It doesn’t mean I’m right and he’s wrong.
We’re often trapped by our subjectivity. When confronted by behaviors or perspectives that threaten our sense of what’s “normal,” our instinct is to entrench ourselves more deeply in our beliefs.
At the retreat, I walked around a meditation labyrinth and chanted under my breath, “There is no normal. There is no normal. There is no normal.” Maybe he’s hearing things. Maybe he’s exaggerating. It doesn’t matter: everyone’s experience of reality is true. I needed to pull myself out of my subjectivity. For my own peace and sanity, I needed to stop “othering” him and his experience.
There are some really cool CBT exercises to open up your perspective and create deeper understanding of potential blind spots. One is called the discernment exercise which helps you understand valid points and narratives that could shape the situation. When you do them enough you start to develop a naturally more open frame of understanding and life can be a little less stressful.
Hey Elaine! Thanks for sharing. Curious how you plan to move forward with this