My Love Letter to Big Thoughts and Feelings

Some of you may relate to the sensory overload of a long day filled with ordinary activities and overlapping conversations on campus. A real mess of stimulus, another type of fatigue. Things can suddenly become too loud, too bright, the images flash too fast. Describing this can sound hyperbolic, but when it comes to the sensory experience, everything tends to be more intense. Especially in a society where everything becomes “overstimulating” - a word commonly used in our generation to describe a crowded place, a white light, etc. quickly becoming a social media buzzword that has lost its impact. 

Then, dissociation inevitably strikes, as a coping mechanism, when everything is too complicated to handle. The body abruptly shuts down. This is a scientific fact (and this is when I step out the intense tone). You are now watching reality from a detached point of view, and helplessly, you struggle to find an anchor point. You fall into a state of confusion and helplessness. 

Growing up, I associated this sensitivity and the strange state to weakness, as an inevitable way to live. A flaw I have to fix. However I will not tell you about any magical surgery, but my discovery of music genres. As every teen should, I started blasting all my newly found favorite artists in my headphones, dancing and jumping in my room. I didn’t realise it at first but I was building a comfort zone, with my favorite gut-wrenching, heavy bass, and screaming tunes to push back my own boundaries. 

As soon as I moved to 'the big city’ I found the escapism and exaltation in concerts, and very quickly in the night life. Not to say that I was going out that much (I’m not the biggest party girl), but once in a while I found the motivation to stay up later than usual. This sense-altering experience was now possible thanks to a live surround-sound system of people. 

I found it strange how these large groups didn’t make me feel the same at night, so I started to intellectualise these feelings (my parents definitely chose the ‘thought daughter’). I remember asking my mom why the noisy drums of the local fanfare changed the rhythm of my heartbeat, and then rediscovering these strange feelings years later, within the pulsating nights in the big city. 

More than just the sound, the lights also shaped this experience. They became more dreamy, between the nostalgia and futuristic neon lights. It created a sanctuary outside of time, and so pretty in its transience. It allowed the body, so restrained during the day, to hover and be guided by sound waves. 

I like to watch people losing themselves to the music, and seeing their enthusiastic expressions. I wonder how close our feelings are to each other, the escapism, the freedom, being part of the crowd that is hovering and quivering to the music. The sense of unity becomes so comforting. During the night, what I consider my weakness turns into an amplificator of feelings, I can finally align senses with serenity. 

When the lights are low the dissociative state helps me feel. So this is a kind of love letter to the night noises and the big feelings, sometimes too much to handle, blending into a fleeting apotheosis at a few moments. 

I chose to tell you this story with a real idealized vision of nightlife and the sensory world, because when I tried to search for some dissociative experiences, it seemed far from the feeling of being overtaken. But when talking about music and freed bodies, no other tone than the unreal can get closer to it. 

To be honest, I am aware that music can’t permanently solve all of this daily cognitive overload, as everyone has different coping mechanisms. But finding at least one way to feel comfortable, both in my body and my mind, seems to be a great start for this long and cruel self discovery process of the early twenties. 

The idea for this article was devised during our 4/10/26 Writers' Room: Sense.

Words by Tina Sylvain, she/her