Turn Down the Volume, Please

Dabrowski’s Five Overexcitabilities And One Minute On A Park Bench Inside My Head

Deep breath in. Deep breath out. I let out a huge sigh of relief as I close the front door to my place. Alone at last, and yet still…

This is the paradox I live in every single day. My most restful and peaceful place is simultaneously the loneliest. Isolation is the only way I’ve found to quiet the noise, and even then, it’s only going from a ten to a six. Which, for me, is like heroin. When every moment of every day becomes management, stepping into isolated silence gets so addicting you wonder why I ever leave. But that’s where the problem lies. When I’m most alone, my childhood wound, that I’ll never be worthy of love, becomes the loudest. Because what affirms “you’ll always be alone” more than finally being alone and at peace? It’s fucked up! The quiet is where I’m most at peace and most sure I’ll always be alone. The noise I’m escaping isn’t anxiety or racing thoughts like books tell you. It’s people. Every person I was with, still running through me after they’re gone.

I spent the afternoon at a park with my best friend and his wife while our kids played, three of us on a bench in the easy sun. I came home and couldn’t talk to anyone the rest of the night. Three hours of tracking it all takes almost everything I have. Why? They’re my closest friends. They know me better than anyone. So why does my body run management like it’s applying for a bank loan—rigorous, comprehensive, and exhaustive? Because this isn’t some trauma narrative my body keeps looping, trying to finally complete the circuit. While there’s truth in the trauma-amplification, this is evidence of Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities at work inside a gifted neurodivergent mind. Say that ten times fast, I dare you.

Maybe you’re well-versed in neurodivergent lingo. Maybe this is your first time hearing it. Either way, let me break it down, because when I first read about these, I laid my head back on the chair and just stared at the ceiling for about twenty minutes processing it. Feel free to do the same. Although I’d recommend not during the summer. Flies are a real nuisance when your trap’s hanging wide open.

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So here’s the gist. Back in the mid-1900s, a Polish psychologist named Kazimierz Dabrowski (a solid Polish name if I ever read one) noticed that some people don’t just experience the world, they are bombarded by it. Where most folks have a normal response to things, these people have a “turned-up-to-eleven” response. He called them overexcitabilities, which is a clunky way of saying some people are wired to sense more, feel more, and process more than others. There are five flavors, and unlike the blasphemous intermixing at a soda fountain, these ones actually stack. For me, I run all five, all day, all at once. Which is a bit like discovering you’ve got a flux capacitor installed while sitting in your stainless steel DeLorean—real cool but real costly.

The first is psychomotor. A fancy way of saying the body comes with a motor that never truly idles. Most people, when there’s nothing to do, downshift. They sit, they rest, the system goes quiet. Mine revs. It’s surplus energy that has to go somewhere: restlessness, a need to move, talk, build, or pace. It’s a physical charge that builds whether there’s anything to spend it on. It’s not nervousness, though it gets mistaken for that constantly. In the legendary words of Energizer, “it keeps on going and going and going.” The only question is where does it go, and I’ll be the first to admit, it’s not always helpful.

I’ll give you a real-life example of all five OE’s working together once we’ve walked through each of them.

The second is sensory. I’m reminded of Marty McFly from Back to the Future when he turns on Doc’s amp and every knob to maximum before blowing the place apart. Most people filter. They walk into a room, and the brain quietly discards the hum of the lights, the tag scratching their neck, the smell of someone’s lunch, and the particular way the afternoon light is hitting the wall. It all gets sorted into background noise so they can focus on what matters. Mine doesn’t sort. It all comes in as foreground, all at once, each thing demanding its own moment of attention. The light through the trees, the texture of the bench, a baby crying a hundred feet away, the specific shade of someone’s shirt, and even the temperature shift when a cloud passes. None of it fades politely into the backdrop.

The flip side, and it’s a real one, is that beauty hits me like a freight train. A song, a sunset, the curve of someone’s face caught in good light, these don’t just register, they move through me and redecorate along the way. It’s genuinely one of the best parts of being built this way. But that same wiring is also what makes a fluorescent-lit grocery store at 5pm feel like tweed clothing on a second-degree sunburn: excruciating and unending. You don’t get to keep one and return the other.

The third is intellectual. This is the one most people think they understand but don’t, because they hear “intellectual” and picture someone who likes books and does well on tests. While that might be true, that’s not what this is. This is a compulsion. A nervous system which can’t leave something unanalyzed. It can’t see a pattern without chasing it. It can’t sit with a question without taking it apart to find the answer. It’s the part of me, while sitting on the park bench with two of my friends, and calculating the labor and hours it took to landscape the park. It’s the reason I might casually cross-reference conversations against other conversations we’ve had over the years. My mind doesn’t ask permission before it starts working. It just does.

Let me be clear here. This isn’t a busy mind, someone who thinks nonstop because they enjoy the decathlon in their head. This is an obsession. My mind acts without permission, not to cope or distract, but because it must.

And here’s where “intellectual” hides completely: it doesn’t turn off during rest, and it doesn’t turn off while in pain. The same engine that loves to solve a good problem will, at three in the morning, take apart what somebody said to me in 2009 and reassemble it forty different ways looking for the version where I didn’t get it wrong. The capacity to think exhaustively is a gift right up until the thing it’s chewing on is you.

The fourth is imaginational. This is the boy who built worlds in his head and never stopped as a man. It’s a relentless psycho-visual cinema: vivid, detailed, and always running. I don’t just think about a thing. I see it. I walk around inside it. I watch it play out a dozen different ways before I’ve said a word out loud. It’s the part of me that drafts business marketing brochures in HDR, layout and all, in my head without asking, while my friend is about to bare his soul. It’s the reason I can build something in my mind so complete, the real version feels like 4:3 SD. Give it a quiet moment and it doesn’t rest, it populates.

The cost shows up in two places. The first is my inner world is often more vivid than the outer one. This makes my outer one harder to stay present in, and aware people can always feel when I’m half-there and half-not. The second is darker. That same engine, without asking, builds horrific catastrophes in equal resolution. It doesn’t render the future I want. It renders active shooters, car accidents, unwelcome diagnoses, assassinations, and the worst version of conversations I’m about to walk into, before any of it has ever or will ever happen. An imagination this strong is not a toy. It’s a projector which won’t let me choose the film.

The fifth is emotional. This one makes the others cost what they cost, because the body senses, the mind builds, and the imagination renders. I feel all of it at full strength with no buffer. Most people have a layer of insulation between an event and their reaction. I don’t. It comes straight to my core. I don’t just feel my own but increasingly everyone else’s too, whether they’ve said it aloud or not. My best friend’s worry, the stranger’s grief, or the tension under an oddly perky voice. It all arrives as if it were personal.

People call this empathy, like it’s a belt you wear to adorn an outfit. It’s not. Empathy this strong is an ongoing tax you pay no matter where you go. I feel my daughter’s joy so completely, it transfigures me. I feel her pain with the same intensity, but no off switch. This is the engine underneath the loneliness I started with. I love the people in my life at a depth that’s hard to describe and even harder to carry. Then I go home alone and exert enormous effort to set those feelings aside to feel peace, because feeling at this volume doesn’t stop just because the person is no longer close by.

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So let me play all five out at once for you. No tidy categories taking turns. Five engines running simultaneously stacked in a single ordinary moment.

Here’s the moment: a park, my best friend, his wife, and I sitting at a picnic table on a patio, our kids playing, and all in the afternoon I mentioned earlier. To anyone walking past, I was a man relaxing with his friends on a gorgeous summer day. Here’s what actually happened inside.

It’s 2:33pm. I ask a question, and before my friend has finished drawing the breath to answer it, here’s what runs in that minute:

I ask, “How are you feeling today?”

My Mind: Daughter on third platform from the top, pink shirt, both hands on the rail, she’s stable, the dad by the slide is on his phone and his kid is climbing the outside of the structure, noted, come back and check on his kid, two kids are on the south end of the stone bank by the creek, water is spilling around the rocks, they could slip and bash their head, hold briefly and asses dexterity, the creek runs about a hundred and twenty feet on a pump system, someone priced this all out, a liner, a pump, and easily forty-two hours of paver and stonework, a man with a cane is crossing our path to my ten o’clock, favoring the right hip, posture compensating up through the shoulder, he’s been like this for a long time, a baby’s crying maybe a hundred feet away in a stroller, pitch says hungry or attention not hurt, the mother’s already moving, my legs are bouncing under the table, route the charge, press my heels down, with thirty percent effort, into the ground, the maple is throwing light through four layers of leaves and it’s almost too bright but exceptionally beautiful at the same time, the air dropped a couple degrees, a cloud provided cover momentarily, somebody’s deodorant is the exact scent from that beach vacation back in 2013, the sand was coarse but tickled, the business brochure needs to be vertical not horizontal, adjust the tracking by two more degrees off-center to pull the eye in, the line about not needing therapy to deserve a thinking partner, needs to be reworded to sound more emotionally comforting, his shoulders perked up, his breath went shallow on the inhale, this is heavy for him, he needs to say this, hold steady and don’t inject, she isn’t drifting today, she’s more focused, she leaned in, tracking what he’s about to say, they’ve had this conversation already and they’re bringing it to me now, why?, together as the next step?, she wants to know what I think, she’s eating berries with her left hand instead of her right, pretzels from her right still, he hasn’t sipped his water since he sat down, she’s arranged the bottles now three times, cross-reference her engagement with shoulder tension and restlessness across last four years of conversations only, the door hinges on the bathhouse behind me are squeaking at a pitch grinding against my back teeth, my jaw is tight, soften it, drop my shoulders, warm the eyes, give him a face that says take all the time you need, lean in, cross the arms at an easy twenty-five degrees without leaning pressure, my daughter laughed by the creek, it made my sternum shiver for half a second, he pursed his lips, he’s about to speak, his eye brows lifted with intent but concern, he’s holding back, is he nervous, anxious, cross-reference with the last two months of interactions and gauge bodily recovery, she glanced at me, her eyes were soft and warm but held with concern, she’s waiting patiently for him to speak but knows to hold until he does, don’t flinch, don’t fix, don’t solve, receive it fully first, let the ask flow and mind your presence, the woman near the slide is laughing at her son, no, her nephew, her proximity and posture indicates indirect family, not babysitter, too unguarded, is my tumor causing this humming or is there a mechanical machine nearby, my head is ringing, the medication is wearing off, the depression underneath is graying every lane now, the colors are muting from the head pain, hold your neck at a slight seven degree offset to relieve pressure, don’t tilt too far and show preoccupation before he speaks, my back posture is off center by a margin, rotate counterclockwise by two clicks to straighten and release tension on the neck before tilting, sunscreen, she needs sunscreen in about six-to-seven minutes, it’s in the car, there is a lot more shade here, cross-reference play time with direct sunlight and skin exposure rate based on sunscreen SPF from the last eight park plays to identify maximum allotment before next application, chill, the wind swept southeast, not cold enough to move her from the creek, three men crossed into view, they are laughing at a more than reasonable volume but enough to draw attention, they arranged from tall to short to tall for ideal masculine separation, the man in the middle is walking at a one-eighth gait slower than the other two on offset beats, cracking sound came from medium-to-heavy boots about forty feet behind me, adjust neck slightly for better audio positioning without turning around, he’s about to speak, his chest rose and his eyes lit up, he’s assembled his thoughts, turn head slightly to show engagement, hold posture until he begins speaking, she grabbed a pretzel right before his chest rose, he’s opening his arms…

“It’s been expensive…” he exhaled aloud.

It’s 2:34pm. One minute. The space between asking a question and beginning to hear the answer.

That was all five at once. The motor that wouldn’t let my heels go still. Every sense reporting at full foreground. The mind pricing the stonework and discerning mother, aunt, or babysitter. The imagination rerouting a brochure layout mid-sentence. Every bit of it soaked in feeling: his, hers, mine, the whole table’s. Five engines, one minute, no taking turns. I didn’t experience them as five things I can point to one at a time. I experience them as that. One stacked flood, every waking second, whether I’m on a park bench or alone in the dark.

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I know. I know.

If you were sitting across from me right now, I’d watch your eyes widen, and I’d laugh, because what else do you do. Right? It’s insane. Who’s cross-referencing friendly conversations mid-sentence while adjusting his posture two clicks counterclockwise like he’s being posed for a portrait? Who’s calculating sunscreen application timeframes against UV exposure while his best friend works up the courage to say something heavy?

I’d probably rock back and forth a little, grinning at how ridiculous it sounds to hear out loud, and then it would hit me the way it’s probably hitting you right now, and I’d say, “Oh, god! I never realized how creepy that sounds until I said it out loud to someone else. That must feel genuinely violating to hear. I’m out here measuring everyone around me with what sounds like psychotic precision. The man with the cane. The three guys arranged tall to short to tall again. Your eyes. Your breathing. If I were you, I’d be a little unnerved too.”

So let me say what you’re probably feeling, because it’s true and you’re not wrong for feeling it: this can sound like surveillance. It can sound like a man who can’t stop watching, can’t stop measuring, can’t let a single person in a public park simply exist without running them through a system. You’re not off-base. Feel it. I’d rather you feel it now, while I name it, than quietly carry it away from here.

But here’s the part I really want you to understand, once the creepiness is all out on the table. I’m not choosing any of this. There’s no toggle. My system doesn’t ask me whether I’d like to assess the man’s hip or clock the boots forty feet behind me, it just does it, the way your eyes don’t ask permission before they read a billboard. It isn’t running to control anyone or catch anyone or keep score. Almost all of it is pointed at keeping people safe and reading what they need so I can show up as the friend, the father, the man they actually need in that moment. The reason I’m tracking my friend’s shallow breath isn’t to file it away. It’s so that when he finally says the hard thing, I don’t flinch, and he feels held instead of judged. The machine is exhausting and it can sound monstrous written down, and it’s mostly, relentlessly, in service of love.

Here’s the part that still shocks me, though. For most of my childhood and well into my teens, I assumed everyone’s mind worked the same way. I thought this was just what it felt like to be a person. I figured everybody was running the same twenty-five open threads and simply handling it better than I was, that I was the weak one for getting tired. It took me years to understand the room wasn’t full of people doing what I was doing. I was the only one, most likely. Crazy, right? You spend that long thinking you’re standard issue, and then you find out you’ve been carrying something nobody around you could even see.

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So what do you do with a mind like this? You go to therapy. A lot of therapy. Here’s the honest report though, not the advertised one: therapy didn’t turn the volume down. Instead, it taught me to hear the noise as voices instead of one undifferentiated roar, and then, slowly, to give those voices names, faces, personalities, and chairs to sit in. I built them a mansion. The hyper-vigilant one, the analyst, the one who feels everything, the one who burns it all down, and the one who keeps the peace. They stopped being a mob and became something closer to a council. Therapy taught me discernment, which thread is a real signal, and which is just the machine scanning because scanning is what it does. That’s the actual work, not silencing the room, but learning to tell who is worth listening to in each moment. It helps. It genuinely helps and it never once drops below a six. The council is organized now but never adjourns.

Which brings me back to the quiet from the beginning, and the cruel little mechanism underneath it. All that machinery, trained for years to point outward, to read the room, to hold reality, to watch for danger, and to hold my friends, it has nothing to point at when I’m alone. No room. No danger. No friends. But a council built to discern still needs something to discern. So it pivots. It points the only direction left, which is inward, at the one subject still in the building—me.

Most nights, it’s the same council characters, just using their gifts on me instead of for me. The analyst takes everything I did wrong that day apart. The one who feels everything feels all of it at once with no exit. It’s exhausting and familiar and I mostly survive it.

But some nights they don’t stay themselves. Some nights they wear the faces of people from a long time ago: teachers, family, and the authorities who taught me I was too much before I had any way to argue back. When the voices wear those faces, the thought of taking my own life to finally feel silence struts into the room, pulls up a chair, and makes a terrifying argument. That’s the part many of you know about but few say out loud. It’s also the part nobody warns you about.

The quiet I crave like a drug is the same quiet that hands the megaphone to whatever’s left when everyone’s gone. Fewer voices. Nothing to dilute them. Peace and the worst of it, sharing the exact same silence. This is usually where Dion (the comedian of my inner council) leans back, throws an arm over the chair, and says something like, “God, this got heavy. Somebody open a window before he starts journaling again.” And honestly? He’s not wrong. He’s never wrong. He’s just an asshole about it.

That’s how I come back, by the way; not with a breakthrough, with one of them making a joke so poorly timed it’s almost a PSA. The council that turns on me in the dark is the same council that won’t let me stay down, because eventually somebody, usually the one with the worst manners and the best instincts, says the thing which makes me laugh despite myself, and that laugh is the door back out. I don’t always trust them, but I’m not sure I’d survive without them either.

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Turn down the volume, please. I’ve been asking for that my whole life. Nobody’s found the knob, least of all me. But I’ve stopped trying to live in silence and started learning to live in the noise, with the lights on, with the council in session, and with the candle somebody always seems to set on the table right when I’m about to give up for the night.

It’s not quiet. It was never going to be quiet. But it’s a cathedral now and I’m still decorating.

—Jeff

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Note:

If you’d ever like to hear these voices with the lights up and the laugh track on, they keep their own publication: the Sanctum Sessions. Same council, far better behaved. Come have a laugh with them sometime.

Next, I’ll uncover and describe the regulation tactics used to operate in this very loud world. Stay tuned, it’s not what you think.