Music is a powerful medium that has deeply moved humanity for centuries so it’s no surprise when a song stirs such deep emotions in people today.
Music is more than just entertainment. Many artists use it to process their emotions and explore their identity. The artist finds healing in creating while the audience finds it in experiencing.
BTS Suga/Agust D’s “Amygdala” was one such song that helped the creator process their trauma while inviting the listener to heal theirs.
If you’ve never heard of the word before, the Amygdala is a small, almond-shaped part of the brain that processes emotions. It stores emotionally charged negative events as strong memories to help you avoid similar threats in the future. This is necessary for survival but it can also keep you stuck if you find yourself ruminating and acting out of fear, anger, and stress.
Agust D’s “Amygdala” highlights this process beautifully by depicting the protagonist struggling to break free from his trauma.
The song starts with Agust D trapped in his painful memories. He tries to reach for the door, to get away from the darkness but fails. His mind keeps replaying traumatic events from his past, like a record stuck on the worst possible part.
It’s a moving depiction of trauma, of wanting the pain to stop but being unable to make it go away. In fact, the more you try to escape it, the harder it becomes to deal with, as visualized in the video when Agust D is crawling towards the door but it becomes steeper and steeper until it’s vertical (almost impossible to ascend).
Agust D’s desperation really comes through and gut punches you during the chorus when he literally screams “Amygdala please stop this, let me out.”
The flashing lights, the nonstop repeating of traumatic memories, the vigorous body movements, and the desperate singing paint a powerful picture of someone suffering, trapped in their painful mind.
The frantic turning of the door knob perfectly captures the feeling of “I would do anything to get out of this but I just can’t.”
The more he tries to escape it, the harder it gets until he’s given it his all and can’t take it anymore so he surrenders.
This doesn’t mean he has given up to despair. He comes to accept that he just can’t change his past. He can’t erase the painful memories no matter how hard he tries. This is a part of his life whether he likes it or not.
Instead of burying it and hoping it goes away, he has to process those feelings to move forward in life.
I don’t know Korean but I always listen to the music and watch the video without subtitles to get a feel for the song first.
Music transcends language barriers. You can feel what the artist is trying to convey without knowing a word of the lyrics, especially for a song as powerfully sung and performed as Amygdala.
The message resonated loud and clear and I felt things deep within me that I had never touched before.
Later, when I actually took the time to understand the lyrics, the song absolutely broke me.
Obviously, the specifics of his pain were different but the feeling many of us share. The feeling of being trapped in your pain, being unable to let go, repeatedly reliving traumatic memories, vigorously trying to escape, and being pulled deeper into despair.
The worst suffering comes from things you can’t control, from bad things that happen to you regardless of how careful you are — the inevitable downs in the rollercoaster of life.
In those moments, like Agust D, I’ve found myself going back in time and wondering what I could have done differently, how I could have stopped this from happening, and where I went wrong.
The answer is nothing.
It’s a painful yet healing silence.
You can’t control or change what happens to you. You’re strapped into this rollercoaster but you’re not driving it. You can’t make it go straight or up. You can’t be happy and okay all the time. That’s life.
All you can do is accept and deal with the painful parts of the ride. Understand that it sucks and what happened is not your fault but how you heal is up to you.
One of the best things to have come out of experiencing this song – I felt braver and ready to express myself more authentically.
Watching Agust D open his mind and heart, processing pain through his art, inspired me to do the same.
I rarely voiced my honest thoughts online or created work that felt “true” to me because I was worried about the backlash.
I wanted to present a “perfect” and “professional” image but watching Agust D pour his raw experiences into creating a masterpiece that heals both him as an artist and us as the audience encouraged me to tap deeper into myself, to draw further from the creative well and put out stuff that was unhingedly, authentically ME.
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