When You Realize Your Life Was Never as Private as You Thought (Sicily Story)

I’m ashamed.

I’m going to tell you why…

A little over two years ago, I bought my row house in a working-class neighborhood in Bagheria, Sicily. I mean, I knew nothing about Bagheria. I just knew I wanted to be close to Palermo, that the rooftop terrace gets sun pretty much all day, and that there’s a Lidl a 6-minute walk away.

When Harry and I were renovating the house, I asked him: “How noisy do you think it is here?”
“Ah, not at all,” Harry said, “these walls are so thick, the neighbors can’t hear a thing.”

And overall, the neighborhood is pretty calm. At certain fixed times of the day you hear music, loud chatter, life happening. And at other, equally fixed times, there’s nothing. Dead silence. You can set your watch by it. Between 1 and 3 in the afternoon and from 11 p.m. onward, it is always completely quiet. Without exception.

Back then, while we were renovating, I thought the sounds I heard were coming from the street, not from inside the houses. After all, Harry had said the walls were thick, right?

For a long time, I genuinely thought I had some kind of poltergeist in the house at night. I often heard someone in heels running up and down the stairs. The sound was so convincingly close, and the houses were supposedly soundproof because of those thick walls, that it simply couldn’t be anything else than coming from inside my own house.

During that renovation period, I got extremely irritated with Harry more than once.

You know he later had a brain hemorrhage? Looking back now, there were probably already signs of brain damage back then.

There was this one time we were assembling an IKEA cabinet together. Frustrating experience. I wanted to follow the manual step by step, systematically, because in my experience that’s the fastest way to get things done. But Harry insisted on questioning every single next step and turning it into a debate. Every screw had to be discussed in terms of the “best possible way” to attach it, and of course none of my suggestions were ever good enough. Meanwhile he came up with—what felt to me—completely illogical alternatives that didn’t even follow the manual.

Because of the space, we were doing it on the rooftop terrace. The street was dead silent—or so I thought—because of those thick walls. I couldn’t imagine the entire street actually being that quiet. In Palermo, it was never silent. Not even during siesta, like it is in Bagheria.

Because Harry was driving me absolutely insane with his endless, pointless, time-consuming debates, I snapped a few times and definitely did not keep my voice down.

All while believing it was so quiet outside because of the thick walls…

On another occasion, Harry and I had been drinking beer well into the night. I picked him up from the airport that evening. It was a warm, humid late-spring night. On the way home we stopped in the main square for amazing pizza and a beer. We were in exactly the right mood to continue the evening calmly at home. With more beer, I mean.

And you know what people do after a few beers: they get louder. So did we. With the windows open.

Early the next morning we had to go somewhere (I honestly don’t remember where, it doesn’t matter). As we walked through town, we could clearly hear alarm clocks going off here and there. Very distinctly. As if we were standing in the rooms ourselves.

That was the moment it slowly started to dawn on us that it might actually be a little more acoustically sensitive here than we initially thought.

And if you think about it logically, it can hardly be otherwise: the windows are almost always open, even though from the outside it doesn’t look like it because the shutters are usually closed.

Where we come from, we have double glazing and windows are always shut. In Bagheria, they’re almost always open. Climate difference… duh.

Apparently, it really is true—something I couldn’t imagine before: people are deliberately and collectively quiet between 1 and 3, and from 11 p.m. onward. On the dot.

And that’s where my shame comes in.

Because that rooftop incident was obviously not the only time. I’ve lost my temper with Harry more often than I care to admit. With quite a bit of volume.

All of which must have echoed through the entire neighborhood…

And that’s not even the worst part. The houses here are basically acoustic chambers: concrete, high ceilings, minimal furnishings, tiled floors.

And now I keep wondering what the neighbors must think of me…

“That loud woman. The one who was so harsh with her husband.”

I’ve had a neighbor like that myself once. I remember very clearly how I saw her back then. Which is why I’m honestly terrified that my neighbors in Bagheria see me the same way.

I’m genuinely mortified.

So I thought: I’ll ask ChatGPT how to do some reputation repair.

The conclusion was basically that I just need to consistently show different behavior from now on. Which—out of shame, honestly—I’ve already been doing for a while anyway: staying calm, not causing noise, saying hello politely to neighbors, making the occasional small talk.

But still…

That neighbor I used to have? She hasn’t lived across from me for years. But I still sometimes see her at the supermarket. And the first thought that pops into my head is always: there goes that loud, angry woman. In fact, that image is so strongly etched into my memory that I can almost “hear” her voice automatically.

According to ChatGPT, I don’t need to worry so much about that.

Because there’s something called the “spotlight effect”: people think others notice them far more than they actually do. According to this theory, my brain overestimates how intensely and how long neighbors register and remember my noise, arguments, or raised voice.

And then there’s something called “narrative identity”: people understand themselves through stories they construct afterward. According to this idea, my brain turns scattered moments into one coherent narrative:

• “that loud period”
• “the neighbors who might still remember it”
• “the neighbor I still associate with shouting”
• “my own shame about it”

But that story is not necessarily how others stored it.

They hear isolated moments. They have their own lives. They don’t automatically turn it into a story. Even if they did hear something, it’s usually just: “that house can be a bit noisy sometimes” not “that woman is someone who is always shouting and fighting”

Or at least… I hope so.

• Have you ever misjudged how “private” your home or behavior actually was in relation to neighbors or roommates?
• Do you think we generally overestimate how much other people notice about us in everyday life?
• Have you ever carried a sense of shame about something that, in hindsight, may have been much less significant to others than it felt to you?

Photo: Sara Abilova