#I feel like I must've gotten positive and negative responses to complaints completely at random as a kid

[llatimeria]

why are upstairs neighbors the way they are. i know this is long but can somebody please . please read this and give me a reality check

the last few people who rented the apartment above us were annoying too but it pales in comparison to whoever lives there now. Every single fucking day, usually in the evenings or late afternoons, they do ... Something. it could be sex or some kind of exercise or any other number of things. It's just a lot of THUD THUD THUD THUD THUDs on and off for half an hour to an hour and a half. Today it started at 8pm and lasted til 9 but the last time I made a note of the time it happened around 3pm as I was trying to do homework.

It feels like the whole ceiling shakes. I swear sometimes it fucks with the air pressure in my ears, which is really hard to notice until it's driving me insane, like a grain of sand in my sock. It's started to stress out our dog, which just makes her start barking (and she's clearly barking at the ceiling), but her barking is in itself overstimulating, which stresses us out more, which she picks up on, which just makes her bark more because she's baby and doesn't like it when her dads are anxious.

The thudding alone can be enough to overstimulate us, but combined with the barking and coincidental other neighbor noises that don't usually bother us, it's... Extremely draining. We're both neurodivergent people with PTSD. Loud, unpredictable noises don't really mix well with us. On more than one occasion my partner's had full blown anxiety attacks bc of the combination of sudden loud noises (a known trigger for them) and the overstimulation (another known trigger for them). We like. Actively can't keep living like this. lmao. I cannot stress enough how it is every day and never quite at the exact same time so we can emotionally prepare for it, and it's not like we should have to prepare to exist in our own living room anyways.

Anyways I just need to purge all of my anxieties and get a reality check about this. Help

We could just be stupid and unreasonable and should just grow up and get over it, and will be fully confronted with that if we do anything.

We might just open ourselves up to harassment (or becoming the butt of a lot of jokes) because we're the whiny neighbors who have nothing better to do than complain

Even if we are being reasonable, it doesn't really make a difference, because if our neighbors think that we're not, they could harass us anyways

They could make a noise complaint about our dog out of spite ("why are you mad at Them when it's Your dog that barks")

Maybe we're also extremely annoying neighbors and we'll look like huge assholes/idiots if we complain about anyone else (implausible, but again. Small dog)

What if we try to contact them and they interpret it as an attack on them. We think one of the people living above us is a very large, heavyset man we've seen around the apartment complex, and we don't want to put our feet in our mouths if he's literally just vibing (or worse, excercising to lose weight) and we just totally humiliate him by telling him his mere footsteps are overstimulating down here. I don't want anyone to feel BAD. (And we're also not totally sure the guy we've seen is actually the guy above us, we just know they showed up around the same time)

We did actually try bonking the ceiling with a broom a few days ago and they obviously heard it because they stopped for a second, laughed, and started doing whatever it is more loudly, but what if that was entirely a coincidence and they didn't notice at all

What if they interpret any message we send as a passive-aggressive attack rather than just trying to let them know how loud they're being

And what if we do actually come across as passive-aggressive towards people who aren't us and we just make everything worse by bungling our communication attempts. It wouldn't be on purpose, but again it doesn't matter because some people interpret everything as an attack regardless

They could generally just fuck with our lives and make us miserable forever with no recourse if we fuck this up, too. like. We LIVE right BENEATH them. They know where we live and probably the layout of our apartment, since it's probably identical to theirs. They could probably figure out which car is ours. They could report our dog barking, or just come up with any number of fake/minor complaints. They could stalk us, vandalize our shit, intentionally make more noise or make louder noises and intentionally try to overwhelm/trigger us, or any number of things. Even if they got in trouble for it, that doesn't really matter because I just don't want it to happen in the first place.

And, worse, what if we try to get them punished, but it turns out we really were the aggressors the entire time according to anyone normal, and we just get our entire lives deservedly wrecked instead

i don't know what to dooooo