I moved into this apartment at the end of March, a few days after LA’s lockdown officially began. You started learning the piano in the beginning of April, a few days before we all realized we might be stuck inside for quite some time.

You often practiced in the morning while I made eggs and coffee. When the eggs were good, I posted them to Instagram. I mostly ignored you, or I turned up the fan to drown you out. I stayed glued to my phone, scrolling through a feed full of other people's breakfasts and bread-making, their work-from-home set-ups, the sunny spring views from their living room windows. We thought this would be over soon, that we'd better document it so we could show each other how we made the most of this time to better ourselves. I wondered if you were posting the piano playing to your own social media, or if you were waiting until you actually became good at it. I was sure you’d give up at some point, but I wondered if I’d need a larger fan until then to block out the sound of you.

The fan is for noise rather than ventilation: I have a neurological hypersensitivity to sound. If I have to listen to a noise I cannot control—chewing, loud music through a stranger's headphones, someone tapping a pen on a desk, applause that lasts too long—I often have an unusually adverse physical reaction. Sometimes it feels like an anxiety attack, sometimes my ears and face become so hot I have to leave the room, even if I’m at work. When I was living in New York (all sound, all the time), it got so bad that I would sometimes have hives after getting off the subway. Though the triggers have become slightly more predictable, a certain sound or situation can still take me by surprise and cause a reaction. Living alone helps. Loud neighbors do not.

While you learned the piano, I learned all the new sounds of my apartment. I learned that I have to wake up by 9 am on Monday mornings to turn the fan up to full volume and put on headphones with music, because the manager comes around to vacuum the hallways. I learned that one of the apartments in the building next to mine is undergoing renovations, and that sometimes the construction workers blast their favorite radio station for the whole street to hear. I learned that I have to keep my bathroom door closed, otherwise I can hear everything—literally, everything—that my neighbor does in his bathroom. Mornings are not a great time for him. 

OA: What are sounds in Los Angeles (in the non-quarantine era) that you unexpectedly enjoy, despite your hypersensitivity?

This could be pre-pandemic nostalgia speaking, but I really miss being in a crowded bar and picking up pieces of many different conversations (as long as I can move away from those conversations whenever I want to). I miss anything that is genuinely background noise, as in easy to tune out: the ocean, the hum of freeway traffic (at night, when it's actually moving). Strangely, I miss the sounds of a baseball game at Dodger Stadium (I didn't even go to games that often, but I guess I just miss everything at this point). I also miss the sound of anyone laughing really hard.


OA: How, if at all, do you feel like your neurological condition affects your written work? 

I think being a writer has affected the way I experience the hypersensitivity, rather than the other way around. I want to know exactly how it works and why it's happening. My writer brain is just in constant observation mode, always asking questions about it and trying to connect it to other experiences in my life. I also find it frustrating that I haven't been given a specific name for it: one doctor called it misophonia, another said it could be a symptom of autism, while several Reddit forums have said it's auditory processing disorder. Everyone agrees it's a hypersensitivity, at least. I think that's why I keep writing about it, to try to get closer to understanding it. 


OA: Your essay features the online world many of us migrated to during the pandemic. Has your relationship to social media shifted in the past year?

I've lost hours of sleep to TikTok and Twitter. It's so hard to shut off, especially when there's nowhere to go. And even though most of the social media channels don't have an auditory component, it's still noise, in a sense. We even use the sound-related term "echo chamber" to describe our own social media circles. When writing this essay, there was part of me that was massively jealous of my neighbor, of their ability to completely absorb themselves in something that didn't involve scrolling through the internet. They were able to shut off that specific noise and focus on something else.  


OA: As someone who wrote for the travel industry, how do you navigate the legacy of colonialism in contemporary travel writing?

I spent most of my twenties in the travel industry, and by the time I left, I had lost much of my initial love for it. When I started, there weren't Instagram influencers. When I left, a lot of people were traveling somewhere just to get a selfie. There was and is a definite colonial gaze problem a lot of the time, as well as ever-increasing environmental consequences. I try to treat my consumption of travel writing and media like I do all other forms of art: I seek out diverse voices and perspectives that haven't been centered in the past. I read less travel writing than I used to, but right now, I have Eileen Myles' The Importance of Being Iceland on my nightstand, for which I am very late to the party. One of my all-time favorites is Martha Gellhorn, a war correspondent who wrote about war by writing about the people disenfranchised by it, the people on the sidelines, women, children, etc. She covered countless international conflicts and war zones and traveled everywhere regardless of whether it was considered safe or appropriate for a woman to do so. 


OA: What are you reading these days? 

Some of my precariously tall to-read pile: Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, True Love by Sarah Gerard, Girlhood by Melissa Febos, Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis, and a Selena Montgomery romance novel (this is Stacey Abrams' pen name! I gave out several of her books for Christmas).