The song that makes me want to quit

There is a song that plays at work sometimes and when it comes on I want to leave. Not in a “this isn’t my taste” way. In a “I am going to walk out of this building and not come back” way. My whole body tightens. My jaw locks. The inside of my skull feels like it’s shrinking.

It’s not even a bad song. I think most people would call it fine. Inoffensive. Background noise. That’s the part I can’t explain to anyone. The disproportionality of it. The fact that a perfectly ordinary piece of music can make me feel like I’m being assaulted.

I sat at my desk last Tuesday and the playlist came on and I spent forty minutes calculating whether I could afford to quit. Not because of the job. Because of the speakers.

Sound has always been the big one for me. There are other sensory things, sure. The tag in the shirt. The wrong texture in my mouth. But sound is the one that can ruin a day in seconds. A fork on a plate. A bass note through a wall. My body doesn’t process these as minor annoyances. It processes them as threats. And once it decides something is a threat, there is no reasoning with it.

The worst part is the anger. Not mild irritation. Rage. Disproportionate, white-hot, childish-feeling rage at a sound that nobody else in the room seems to notice. And then the shame that follows the rage, because you know it’s disproportionate, you know it makes no sense, but knowing that doesn’t make the sound quieter or the rage smaller. It just adds a layer of self-loathing on top.

I’ve tried earplugs. They help sometimes. Loop earbuds, the ones everyone recommends. They take the edge off. But they don’t fix the hypervigilance, which is the real problem. Once my nervous system has flagged a sound as dangerous, I’m listening for it constantly. Even when it’s not playing. Even when I’m wearing the earplugs. My brain is scanning, scanning, waiting for it to start again.

People say things like “just tune it out.” I know they mean well. But that sentence assumes a level of control over auditory processing that I simply do not have. I can’t tune it out any more than I can tune out someone standing on my foot.

I don’t know what the answer is. I have earplugs and I have a playlist of brown noise and I have the option of working from home two days a week which I fought for and got. On the other days I sit at my desk and I breathe and sometimes the playlist is fine and sometimes it isn’t.

What I do know is that it’s not about the song. It never was. It’s about living in a body that can’t filter, can’t prioritise, can’t decide which sounds are background and which sounds are important. Everything arrives at the same volume. Everything is urgent.

And some days that’s manageable. And some days there’s a song and I want to quit.