Sound Sleeper
In my youth, I was an extravagantly heavy sleeper. Nothing woke me — no police sirens or honking horns when I lived in the city, no distant train whistles or whooping hooligan teens when I lived in a small town. When I went off to college, I half-joked about my need for a recordable alarm clock1, so I could capture the sound of my father shouting my name in a particularly urgent, annoyed tone of voice. Every weekday since I’d earned my drivers’ license, I’d needed to wake up at 6am to shuttle him to the train station on time (thus gaining ownership of our minivan for the day). And each of those mornings, this sound of his tenor voice gone baritone — “MARISSAAA!!” — echoed up the stairs and across the length of my attic bedroom. It got me up like a charm. It was the only thing that did.
In the intervening years of adulthood, I’ve often noticed how much easier it is for me to wake to a human alarm (and not necessarily the personalized or urgent kind) than a traditional, inanimate one. For years, I had a roommate, Selah, who worked remotely for a company on the East Coast (famously 3 hours ahead of us here out West). Her job entailed a lot of phone support, so at around 6:10 am each morning — oh, did I mention her desk was in the living room? — I’d hear her greet her first client of the day, “thank you for calling [company], this is Selah, how can I assist you?”
Can I be honest? I kind of loved it. Instead of an angry repeating blare or a once-melodious iPhone alarm grown hateful with repetition, this was a somewhat muffled, friendly greeting, directed at someone else, alerting me like a church bell that morning had arrived. I could fall back asleep if I wanted, but I’d gotten my early warning and could now adjust to the idea of going vertical. When Selah moved out and Megan 12 moved in, that 6:00 am phone-greeting alarm became a 7:00 am burr-coffee-grinder alarm; less harmonious a sound, but at a much nicer hour, so I’d call it even, alarm-clock-wise.
During 2020, my ability to fall asleep and stay asleep frayed along with our collective nerves. I’d noticed long before that, in the same way that human voices could wake me in the morning, I simply could no longer tune out the sound of people talking when I was trying to go to sleep. But other household sounds, mere evidence of human existence, had never been a problem. Yet suddenly, a few months into last year, my kitchen got louder. I would be half asleep at midnight and the sound of a closing cabinet on the other side of the wall would wake me with a start. Not infrequently, I would literally wake with a shout. Other sounds, like the squeak of our screen door, or the sound of the bathroom fan turning on, could just as easily stir me awake. It was ridiculous, infuriating, and even a little embarrassing.
I’ve been living pretty felicitously with a rotating cast of roommates for nearly a decade now. One of my cardinal (personal) rules of adult roommate life is to only make reasonable requests of the other adults who, like me, pay to live in our shared home. “It’s your turn to buy paper towels” is a reasonable request. “Don’t go in the kitchen if I might be sleeping” is not. I needed to find a reasonable way to address my ever-vigilant unconscious brain’s depleted ability to go off-duty for the night. But it seemed like the only way to fix this problem was to fix myself, to change how my body operated. And…how does one accomplish that? Is it even wise to try?
Eventually, I got some professional advice. My therapist told me, with admirable practicality, to just buy some little bumper pads for the kitchen cabinet doors. While I was at the hardware store, I picked up a can of WD40 to address the two squeaky doors that had been periodically plaguing me. The bumper pads did help somewhat in my quest to drift off, though not quite as much as the dropping hospitalization rates in LA County, or my noise machine app.
You might think that the moral of this story is to look for practical ways to abate seemingly intractable problems. And that’s a great takeaway, for you and me both. But the real reason I’m writing about sleep this week, is that on Friday, about four months after buying that small can of WD40, I actually used it on those two squeaking doors.
It’s not that the issue (of my being awoken by suddenly squeaking hinges) went away after I bought the WD40. If anything, it got worse. As life outside the house has become more of a going concern, the uptick in late-night homecomings has led to a lot more witching-hour door squeaks. If I’ve neglected to set up my white noise app, the sound still woke me from a less-than-sound sleep like it always did. And yet, the tool to fix this problem had been sitting in the hall closet. For four months.
On Friday night, a mental fog lifted and I finally put all the pieces together. One little can, five hinges, half a paper towel. I applied the spray. I swung each door back and forth.
Ahh. Silence. But my feeling of triumph was less than total.
The problem of these squeaking doors had cost me hours of sleep over the past year. And it had taken under a minute to fix. I just had to put the tool I’d acquired to its intended use. And that had been the hardest part.
If you’d like to check out another project of mine about sound and its relationship to mental health, listen to this episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast, City That Never Sleeps.
I don’t know if such a thing existed at the time; it would certainly be easy to accomplish with today’s technology.
“Megan 1” because, when they moved out, their room was taken over by someone also named Megan. Incidentally, you can hear both Megans, Selah, and at least 3 other former roommates of mine on past episodes of Sweet Valley Diaries.
The hinge! 👏