Every day at work I listen to music through a pair of top-notch headphones, and the sound they deliver is crisp and deep.
If you wear these noisemakers, you hear music so clear that you’d swear the band is in the same room. You have a private concert, front row, but without the crowd, and it’s hard to not start jiving there at the desk.
But outside? Nobody notices. Which is weird and not-weird.
NOT WEIRD
Technically speaking, the sounds are real. The headphones create pressure waves in the air, which moves my ear drums and oscillates the little hammer, anvil and stirrup bones in my inner ear. This vibrates the perilymph in my cochlea, which stimulates nerves. And just like that, sound happens. It’s real. I can hear it.
BUT NOBODY ELSE CAN
WEIRD
My mental disorder is like that, except instead of music, I have emotions. My neurons fire out of sync with reality and I get slammed with massive walls of feelings that no one else experiences.
Outside, without the headphones, they can’t hear the music. They just see me dancing to a foreign tune.