Coherence Is Currency, I’m Paying In Change

The voices in my head —

They don’t scream.

They echo.

Not loud enough for alarms —

just constant enough to keep me awake

even when the body begs for blackouts.

Sleep isn’t peace.

It’s postponement.

A reluctant truce

with thoughts that build guillotines

out of memories I never meant to keep.

And no —

this isn’t poetry.

This is exhaustion with better vocabulary.

This is insomnia without the obnoxious romanticism,

without the moonlit metaphors.

Just a clock,

a ceiling,

and a heart rehearsing its own shutdown.

I live in a mind

where stillness is suspicious,

where silence is an ambush,

where clarity is a mirage

sold in bottles labeled “productivity.”

I crash on caffeine like it’s cocaine,

Not because caffeine keeps me up

but because it negotiates with the madness on my behalf.

I write to-do lists on my wrists,

then forget them

as soon as my brain picks a new obsession

to chew and choke on.

The world says —

“Get help.”

But doesn’t give a handbook

for how to schedule therapy

between deadlines, disasters,

and pretending to be fine at brunch.

Neurodivergence isn’t quirky.

It’s not an aesthetic.

It’s being an outdated browser

with a hundred tabs open,

a dozen of them frozen,

and no clue

where the music is coming from.

I am fluent in masking.

In pretending to care about what I’m supposed to.

In smiling at the right decibel,

laughing on schedule,

and folding my chaos

into polite sentences.

My conscience

holds performance reviews every night.

Scoring and rating every pause,

every stutter,

every unspoken plea

that could’ve passed for conversation

if I had the right mask on.

Impostor syndrome?

That’s not a condition.

That’s the architecture.

Every apparent achievement comes with

an internal scream:

“You’ll be found out soon.”

I am haunted by hypotheticals.

By the ghosts of things I never said

to people who wouldn’t have listened anyway.

And yet, I apologize.

I apologize before I think,

for daring to occupy air

in a room where coherence is currency

and I only carry change.

The world crowns the linear.

The neat.

The coherent.

The well-branded misery

that can be sold as resilience.

But I was born

without the blueprint for belonging.

I’ve been filling out forms

with answers that don’t exist

in languages I was never taught.

I’ve been waiting

for someone to say:

“You don’t need to be fixed.

You just need to be heard

without being translated in captions and subtexts.”

This isn’t a cry for help.

It’s a refusal to whisper

just because my facts

don’t fit your timeline.

So if the next time I speak

it sounds jagged —

like broken glass reciting scripture —

understand:

this isn’t poetry.

This is a malfunction.

A glitch that’s learned how to rhyme

so you’ll pretend it’s beautiful.

Because not all of us want healing.

Some of us

just want to bleed in peace

without being asked

to colour within your damn outlines.

I don’t need comfort.

I need space.

Space to unravel

without being framed

as inspirational roadkill.

And if my voice

still makes you uncomfortable —

good.

It was never meant

to be your lullaby.

It was meant

to be your fucking wake-up call.

So listen closely.

Not to the words,

but to the silence

after they land.

That?

That’s not applause.

That’s the echo

of a mind cracking

just soft enough

for you to keep scrolling.

But loud enough

to remind you —

Not everyone who’s quiet

has made peace with the noise.

Some of us

are just waiting

for the right volume

to scream ourselves real.