Some of us learn early that we are easier to manage, simpler to understand as a collection of words. More than our lived experiences- society demands our experiences be consumable and acceptable.

At some point, I stopped being a person and started being a compilation of words, something straight out of a LinkedIn bio.

Good daughter. High achiever. Kind friend. Mental health advocate. Too articulate to be truly unwell. Too functional to be in pain. I had become digestible. A version of myself I could show to teachers, therapists, relatives, the internet: neatly captioned, quietly curated, always coherent. And still, inside, I flickered.

What I now understand as depersonalization—that eerie disconnection from one’s self—wasn’t just a symptom of mental illness. It was a symptom of how the world met me: in fragments. In ideas of who I should be. In expectations I never agreed to .Depersonalization, for me, wasn’t merely psychological, it was structural. Being seen only in fragments; by the state, by institutions, even by one’s own family is a social injustice. As a queer, neurodivergent woman from a deeply caste-conscious society, I wasn’t just navigating inner dissonance. I was surviving systems that only wanted parts of me. The bright, verbal part. The performing-part. The pain, the slowness, the contradiction, I learned to hide those early.

We are told mental health is personal. That healing is self-work. That if we feel unreal, it’s a chemical imbalance or a trauma response. But I’ve come to believe that many of us feel unreal because the world makes us so. Because invisibility is designed into the systems we rely on. Because we are only seen when we’re quiet, useful, or easy to name. It’s easy to be a concept when your complexity is never held.

In therapy sessions, I was urged to "ground myself" but I never felt tethered to begin with. My stories were met with empathy, but rarely with context. Nobody asked why I had to compartmentalize so much. Why I needed multiple “selves” just to move through different rooms? Why the places I felt most real were not public at all but in my phone’s Notes app, in abandoned drafts, in screenshots I couldn’t delete. That’s where I existed: in pieces. In the digital void nobody else could see.
Eventually, I began to think of these not as clutter, but as archives of who I was when no one was looking. Emotional traces, glitchy records. A hoard of selfhood I could visit when the world refused to hold me whole.

This, to me, is stewardship. Not productivity. Not clarity. Not optimization. But flickering.

Gathering all the selves I’ve had to be. Honoring the ones that never got to speak. The world doesn’t often reward this kind of care. It likes tidy narratives, healed people, good outcomes. But I believe there is radical potential in what we discard. In what we save privately. In the ways we resist the demand to always perform wholeness. Especially for those of us who are constantly asked to shrink by hierarchies, patriarchal families, ableist institutions, digital platforms that rank our worth in likes and saves.

To be a person is to be messy. To be inconsistent. To hold grief and joy in the same hour. But our systems, therapeutic, bureaucratic, social, aren’t built to handle that. They want the bio version. The one-line summary. The girl who made it despite. But I am not a one-line summary. I am a hundred tabs open. A saved voice note. A long draft that never made it to publish.
The day I realized I was a concept was not the end of something, it was the beginning. The beginning of asking what it might mean to be a full person in a world that prefers ideas. The beginning of holding myself, as I am, without translation.
Some of us were never meant to be easy to manage. Some of us were never meant to be concepts.
We were always more.