(Author’s Note: This is a working semi-fictional narrative about the personal awareness/experience of psychological disorders, in particular mood/personality disorders. It’s meant to be human; not scientific. Therefore, if you want more objectivity, there are probably not enough references/links here for you at this point. The title image is also a work in progress.)

There will never be a perfect time to tell this story.

I may not be the first to tell it either. It is growing and evolving as I type.

I’m supposed to be writing about some website promotion for work, but, honestly, it’s not something I really care for. Or something I believe most people would care about, especially after they spend less than ten seconds to skim through the advertorial to get to the discount code.

What I really want to talk about is that Sunday some of us spent cleaning our rooms in forty minutes while others took three hours and that Monday night we finished twenty to fifty pages of love letters and hate mail we probably shouldn’t have shared. Especially with people we barely knew beyond their Facebook status updates. And all those times our thoughts sprinted at a speed our keyboards could barely match and Facebook popped up in our faces asking us to prove ourselves human with disjointed numbers and letters and the attentive audience wondered in silence, “what the fuck is she on?”

The truth is, nothing. And everything.

I can talk about the hundreds or thousands of things we bought one night and threw away in the middle of the day, and the spontaneous excursions to prohibited places, and loud declarations that we were on top of our games, above them all — so shut the fuck up, please and thanks — but underlying all this, I’m talking about the time when things made complete sense and not at all; little to others and mostly to ourselves.

I’m talking about the kind of sanity that turns up “partial” in legal understanding for the sake of public outcry. For whatever reason.

Or no reason at all.

And the reason I want to talk about it is this: so few of us can put any of this in coherent words without breaking down halfway through, in silence from judgment, both felt and unseen, over the years, be it from our families or the domino effects of media stereotyped affects.

I’ve seen enough. And it hurts to stay silent. Although I am a 27-year-old Malaysian Chinese who has travelled somewhat and may not be the voice of all, but let me speak the minds of some.

They call us by many names and agree on “Disorder”.

Something ‘not quite right’. We call it… Okay. We don’t really know what to call it because we never thought to call what has always been a part of us something alien in the first place. And even if it crept up on us, days or months or decades ago, all of a sudden one fine afternoon on a random Tuesday, completely uncalled for, we only began to see its strangeness when someone else deemed it unwanted. And then we take the help they want us to have. Or we don’t. We don’t know until the storm has died down and we finally wake up for the hundredth time with same but different eyes and our noses finally recognize the smell of brokenness in the damage we’ve done. The damage we once thought was just……a beautiful catastrophe.

It was meant to be.

They worry for us. And they’re right to do so. We don’t live on an island after all, aside from the panoramic merry-go-round in our heads. No view wider than the eyes, the Kings said.

And the truth is, very few things are real to us. To me. Yes and no often exist at the same time and chuck those Psychology textbooks away because I’ve learned since long ago no one knows any better. Even my doctor said so.

And, frankly, aside from our need to co-exist, as a society in harmony, there’s also no need to tell us otherwise.

And, try as we might, we live.