Too loud, too late, too alive

A Manifesto for the Troublesome Women of Courtenay Place

Riona Chen (she/her)

I go to the club to make genuine emotional connections and meaningful conversations. Mock me if you must, but you will never truly experience Wellington nightlife with your nose in the air. 

For a long time, I let the sneers sway my fondness for the club. The ones that said clubbing is juvenile, shallow, a cesspit for the desperate to congregate — the thin-lipped judgements cast on any woman who dares to move her body without shame. I found myself searching for ways to justify the act of going out, ways to distance myself with jokes and self-deprecation: “Oh, I’m not like those club girls. I hate the music.” But the truth is, I am those club girls. Unabashedly, with pride, and to my core. 

Because clubbing is a spiritual experience, if you allow it to be. In the slew of sweat and intoxication, it bears the honesty and rawness of our human desire to connect, to fuck, to dance, to love. When the bass vibrates through the marrow of your bones and you lock eyes with a beautiful stranger across the room, when you scream-laugh with your closest friends under flashing lights, when you share your lip gloss with a girl you’ve never met, when you lose yourself in a song you barely know — what could be more human than that? 

In the club, you find a different kind of truth. Stripped of the polished performances of daily life, people become hungry, simple, alive. It’s not about how intelligent you sound, or the impressiveness of your career, or your academic prowess. In the club, there is a different, universally known language. It’s the tilt of a head, the brush of a hand, the primal stomp of feet hitting sticky floors. It’s longing eye contact at 3am that says I want to be near you, just for a moment. 

Women who love clubbing are dismissed – painted as vapid, superficial, reckless. It’s a thinly veiled misogyny; the classic fear of women who seek pleasure openly. We’re told that true fulfilment is elsewhere: in quiet dinners, in early mornings, in smallness. But what if you find God under a cheap disco ball? What if you feel the most whole when your makeup is smudged, your heels are in your hand, and your arms are around your laughing friends?

Clubbing is not meaningless. It is not just getting drunk and stumbling home. It is dancing out the week’s heartbreaks, the small humiliations, the quiet victories. It’s finding your people, even if only for a few songs. It is surviving another semester, another breakup, another bad day, and celebrating survival with your body, your voice, and your heart wide open. 

I’ve had more vulnerable conversations in the smoking area of the sleaziest of bars than at most brunch tables. I’ve cried in bathrooms with loving strangers who fixed my mascara, who handed me tissues and whispered “You’re going to be okay”. I’ve fallen in love for a night, maybe just with myself. I’ve seen the worst parts of people, too – jealousy, violence, apathy – but that’s just part of it. Clubbing, like life, holds multitudes. It is messy and holy all at once. 

There is sacredness in clubs only some will understand. It’s for the women who dance barefoot when their shoes betray them, who stay until the lights come on and the magic dissolves. For the ones who find meaning in fleeting connections, who chase joy with open palms. 

You don’t have to find beauty in it; that’s fine. Maybe you never will. But don’t mistake your distance for superiority. There is something deeply brave about showing up, about choosing to be seen, to be loud, to take up space in a world that would rather you shrink. 

The club is not an escape from life. It is life, distilled down to its brightest and most brutal parts. And some nights, when the music is right and the air is thick with heat and laughter, it feels like a kind of salvation – one where my Sunday best is glitter eyeshadow and a micro-skirt that would make my mother faint.