At 25, I was institutionalised for 271 days. Out of fear, my mother signed the papers. I was restrained, heavily medicated, and coerced into electroconvulsive therapy. When it ended, there were no words left between us. I erased her from my life, imagining her dead, because I could not understand how that could be love.
Fifteen years later, I learned I am autistic. The diagnosis came too late to save my youth, but it gave me language. I turned my pain outward, fighting to be understood in a world that had already decided who I was. I carried my story into rooms of power, speaking wherever I was invited. That fight eventually brought me into government, where I became the first autistic woman appointed to Malaysia’s National Council for Persons with Disabilities, helping shape the very laws that once erased me.
Behind the speeches and applause, I am still alone.
As my 2-year term inside government unfolds, the film follows my public life and my private collapse. My phone becomes my most constant witness, capturing moments no institution ever sees. When sound and light overwhelm me. When my body shuts down after performing resilience. When I begin to question who justice is really for, and what it means when no court will ever hear my case.
The film turns when I return to my mother, not out of forgiveness, but exhaustion. I keep asking myself what justice actually looks like. Every time I look in the mirror, her face looks back at me. Slowly, painfully, I begin to see what I could not before. Love and care are not clean. Fear shapes decisions. Silence becomes policy. Harm can exist inside love.
As my mother grows older, the future presses in. One day, I will be asked to make impossible decisions on her behalf, just as she once did for me. The film holds this tension without resolution.
This is not a story about reconciliation. It is a story about inheritance. About how families and states manage fear. About what happens when care is shaped by control rather than understanding.
The question that remains is no longer whether my mother and I can begin again, but whether we, and the systems around us, can learn to return to ourselves, after fear taught us to see monsters where there were only humans.
