Sexy and I know it

I am well aware that that title makes this story sound much more exciting than it actually is.

Anyway, I don’t know if I come off well in this story. I’ll leave that judgement up to you.

I didn’t have a very good time at university. I made the wrong choice and went to one that was too far away from home and all my old friends, and I spent the entire time feeling lonely and isolated. I didn’t make any friends while I was there and just bounced between three sets of flat mates each year feeling awkward and uncomfortable in every set of people I surrounded myself with. That’s not for a lack of trying. We just didn’t really have any similar interests and I blamed myself for being a weirdo and ended up shutting myself up in my room and cutting myself off from people.

About the middle of my first year, I found myself getting into a state of heightened anxiety every time I was around people. I knew they weren’t going to actually do anything to me, but I felt oddly vulnerable just for existing in an environment that wasn’t for me. I would only make meals for myself whenever there was a guaranteed chance that no one else would be in a kitchen. The rest of the time I had takeaways, which was where the large bulk of my student loan went. I suppose I didn’t drop out because I was holding onto the hope that things would get better and I didn’t know what else I would do if I wasn’t there.

I slept a lot during those three years. A lot gets talked about depression now, but people rarely understand the physically draining aspect of it. Depression and anxiety are not just issues in your head, depression causes physical fatigue and most days I ended up sleeping 14–15 hours a day. I went to the doctor once and got prescribed pills for it, but they just made me feel even more tired than before and I ended up giving them up because I couldn’t handle the side effects. I wouldn’t end up getting talking therapy for years because I didn’t know it was available on the NHS, which it is, and I highly recommend getting it if you need it.

The smallest group of flat mates was the two guys I lived with in my third and final year. We lived in a bright yellow house in the middle of a cobbled street. I did tell them when I first moved in that my health wasn’t great and that I needed a lot more sleep than most people, but they were both surprised at the extent of it. I was never around. All I was really doing was getting up and going to lectures occasionally and going to work my supermarket job down the road, maybe I’d say hi to them in the hallway if I ran into them.

One night, one of them decided to make an effort to get me into a social situation, and invited me to play Call of Duty with them in his room down the hall. I did have fun. I actually won a game. I started feeling like I was actually a part of a small social group for a bit.

Then one of them started casually using one of the really bad racial slurs in general conversation and I felt awkward and never really interacted with them much after that.

The last interaction I had with that one was when I told him the landlord wasn’t giving me my deposit back because he hadn’t paid his rent. I’m not across the legality of this and whether my landlord was doing something dodgy here by essentially making me responsible for his lack of payment. That was what he told me, but again, I don’t know, and it’s been more than ten years now, I lost his phone number, and I never got that money back.

Anyway, not long after that night of Call of Duty, one of them split up with his girlfriend. Apparently, she punched him in the face not long after their break up. I heard my flatmates talking about it in the hallway when they got back from town. He had a nosebleed and was reeling from it.

A couple of days later, I’d just got back from a really horrible shift at work where a customer started yelling at me because we didn’t have a specific type of butter that he wanted. I was miserable and just wanted to go to sleep, but my flat mate had decided that he had to celebrate that he was ‘back on the market’, so that wasn’t going to happen.

They were in his room down the hall playing really loud music up until about 3am. They kept playing this song that was really popular at the time called ‘Sexy and I know it’ by the Black-Eyed Peas-ish sounding pop duo LMFAO. Its this hideously annoying update of that Right Said Fred song that everybody knows. The song has this high-pitched synth over it that just gets higher and higher until it sounds like tinnitus. If you imagine you’re on a fairground ride that just keeps speeding up faster and faster until you can actually feel the half-digested chips coming up through your throat and out of your mouth: that’s Sexy and I know it by LMFAO.

I don’t know how many times they played it. They all blurred into one.

I could have just got up and confronted them and said, “I’ve had a bad day, can you just go to a club or something?” but they were clearly wasted, and I was in a complete state after just being yelled at by a customer and depression had eaten away at me for months, so I didn’t have the confidence to do anything.

I tried to bear it. I put earplugs in. I balled the pillow over my head, but I still heard that pounding bass in my head and the ringing in my ears, and they kept turning it up. It just kept getting louder and louder.

At about 3am, the door banged open, and I heard them stagger out down the stairs. One of them shouted out “Sorry Stuart!”

So…y’know, at least they apologised, right? Not sincerely, but at least they said the words “I’m sorry”, as meaningless as those words were.

I finally managed to get to sleep, but only for a few hours. I woke up the next day at about 7am feeling like I’d been hit with a brick.

I went to the bathroom and saw the guy’s door was open. He was in bed. Asleep.

And then I had an idea.

A smile prickled across my face for the first time in months.

I went back into my room, got dressed and turned my computer on. I opened iTunes and went to my collection of albums by British grindcore band Napalm Death and shoved them in a playlist with a total runtime of about seven hours and set it to repeat all.

I pressed play, put it on full volume, left my room, locked it, and went to the library for the rest of the day.