A Review: Listening to Rain Sounds
You gotta do what you gotta do to keep The Silence from settling in and having its way with you.
Have you ever sat alone in complete silence with just your thoughts to occupy you?
Sounds like the first line to an absolutely horrifying and nihilistic horror story, doesn’t it? Like the kind of thing that should’ve come with a trigger warning.
Or that could be just me and a pretty sizable conglomerate of people I’ve posed this question to through the years. It’s one hell of an ice breaker.
In my experience, the reactions have not been overly positive. There have been people who seem to have mastered yoga, meditation or sociopathy who were happy to speak to how well they cope with doing this for consecutive minutes on a daily basis, sure, but the overwhelming majority were quick to voice their discomfort with the mere prospect. Some reacted with abject terror. Several ill-advised attempts to use this as a dating app opener resulted in immediate unmatches. (What? You’ve got to try some stuff out there. It’s not like “How’s your weekend been?” was working out any better, statistically speaking. Though now that I think about it there are infinite options to go with instead of those two that are more in a middle ground…)
I personally don’t have any idea how people do it. It gives me the willies.
I don’t know exactly what this says about me. I know it says a lot, and I’ve been trying to nail it down to a few cogent bullet points, max, but I contain multitudes and some psychological situations can’t be fully explained with any modicum of brevity. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop questioning why, probably until the day I die.
But it also doesn’t mean I won’t keep doing my best to avoid having to do it, this sitting with my own thoughts in a noiseless room. I’ve already tried exposure therapies of sorts (mostly self-imposed, admittedly) and nothing has stuck, so I just do what I can to keep the silence from settling in. It’s a lifestyle at this point.
This isn’t to say that I can’t have a comfortable silence with another human being. Far from it. I’m down to shut up and eat my dinner. I can forego the small talk if it’s been that kinda day. There are even times when I won’t mansplain all the nuances of a TV show that I skimmed over on reddit and will just sit there silently while we both wait for the internet to kick back on and the buffering to stop.
It’s only when I’m alone and it’s quiet that it’s discomforting. Sometimes to an excruciating degree.
And this is rather significant, given that I spend the majority of my time alone.
I have, despite what may have been best for me and for reasons I can’t properly articulate (put ’em on the tab), chosen to exist this way for now. It’s not something I would recommend, but it is one way to live.
This seems counterintuitive (because it is) given that too much alone time, if spent idly, is not exactly great for me. Luckily, I have that mostly taken care of. If I’m alone, I’m not lonely. I’m constantly messaging people through various services or calling my mom and turning it into a two-hour conversation when a quick text would have certainly answered the question I initially had to ask her. (And god or something vaguely similar help my art director partner, who I can easily get in touch with whenever I want specifically to ask her if she saw my email I sent earlier because I know she never checks her email.) Or working. Or writing. Or reading. Or watching TV. Or watching YouTube videos of my favorite musicians performing live that I have seen thousands of prior times followed by film scenes that will make me weep every time. (The “Silver Spring” video will always please this solo crowd, and if you can watch the father/son talk from Call Me By Your Name without shedding a tear then I bet you are really great at sitting in silence with your own thoughts to keep you company.) Stuff like that.
The main ones during waking and non-baked hours are working, writing (which I also do for work) and reading (which I guess everyone does for work in some capacity if you think about it).
(Shit. My life seems sad. But I’m fine. Everything’s fine.)
These pastimes have several things in common, including that they’re all pretty rad (even the job, if you enjoy it and/or you’re workin’ for the weekend, amirite?!) and that I can do none of them while listening to music with lyrics. It’s just a hurdle I’ve never been able to get over or circumnavigate. I guess when I’m trying to form words of my own or digest the written words of others, I can’t have someone singing other words simultaneously or I get all mixed up.
Then if I don’t have music on, it’s just, like, quiet. Makes it hard for me to concentrate because my brain has some perverse Pavlovian reaction to The Silence where it’ll immediately get all intrusive and be like, “Hey Scott, remember that time you told a woman you loved her on a first date and made things so weird that instead of staying at her place for the night you went and slept in your car in a Wal-Mart parking lot?” and it’s off to the fuckin’ races from there.
It’s not great for productivity, creativity or maintaining a moderately healthy mental state of being.
So I run from The Silence like it’s chasing me. I’ll go with some jazz, classical or Explosions in the Sky playlists, or an instrumental film score, if i’m feeling a little spicy and devil may care.
But my mainstay is the sound of rain.
Can’t get enough of it. I’m something of an addict. If I’m at my desk, which is more hours of the day than I care to quantify, and I’m not on a call, I’m listening to rain sounds.
You should see my Spotify “Wrapped.” It’s really something to behold. A soundtrack that pairs perfectly with occasional bouts of anhedonia.
I wish this was a joke or embellishment, but it isn’t: The most often-muttered phrase within the confines of my apartment has absolutely got to be, “Alexa, play thunderstorm sounds.” This is second only to, “Alexa, play rain sounds.”
I do thunderstorm sounds during the day and then regular rain sounds at night to complement the sound of my box fan while I make my woeful attempts at getting some serious shut-eye. It’s kind of like I switch to ambient weather sound decaf during the late night and early morning hours.
Seriously. It’s on all the time. It’s on right now. It comforts me. Keeps me from thinking about that one time…Wait. I’m not even going to go there. Not tonight.
Several people, including my neighbor, who once asked me why she always hears the sound of a torrential downpour emanating from my apartment when she walks down the hall, have wondered why I don’t listen to something more cheerful, like birds chirping or crickets rubbing their legs together or whatever and I just always shrug and say I guess it’s because I love rainy days very much.
I’ll take it a step even further and say I don’t really dig sunny days all that much. I appreciate them and do enjoy them and the potential for certain activities they bring sometimes, along with the fact that they do not put the vast majority of the population into a less-good mood like they sometimes do to me, but I’m not opposed to living somewhere where it’s cloudy or rainy more often than not. If I could start again I’d maybe try to become a psychiatrist with a syndicated radio show broadcast out of Seattle.
I don’t know exactly what this says about me. I know it says a lot, and I’ve been trying to nail it down to a few cogent bullet points, max, but I contain multitudes and some psychological situations can’t be fully explained with any modicum of brevity.
And sometimes, it can be better to just go ahead and not question things — to just keep living and making it through the day and night however you need to.
Listening to rain sounds: 5 STARS