Young and Free | BTS [√]

reflection, explanation

You've read young and free, and I've finally finished writing it. 59k words, that's a lot because initially I had intended this story to become WAY smaller. I hope you enjoyed it.

As I've said before, I got this idea in 2016, and that's pretty long ago. First I had thought of making it a short story. There would be 7 chapters, each focused on a member.

I plotted it a lot inside my mind. Often I would think about it, but I never had the courage to sit down and write. I thought no one would read it. My stories were so focused on romcoms, sometimes with a hint of angst, that I'd grown an audience here who would only crowd around my usual works, or so I'd thought.

As I was plotting in my head for all these time, the ideas kept growing and the characters started to become so elaborate that I didn't realize it was impossible to fit each their arcs into single chapters, until I started writing YaF.

The idea came to me through the kdrama age of youth/ hello my twenties but if you've watched that drama you know how vastly different this story is from that. It's the essence I wanted to capture.

People may think youth is such a beautiful, wonderful time of joy, when it's not, most of the time. We go through such difficulties, harsh realities, all of us, that just elude other's eyes.

Each of the members has a story of their own, complex and filled with their own struggles. To the other members it might seem they are fine, because they are only seeing what each member is showing.

I think that's what also happens in real life. We are all so deep in our own abyss, we think that we are so alone in this. Although, everyone is so vivid and everyone is fighting their own demons, maybe even the person next to you. We just don't know, because we are seeing through a window. Everyone is a main character in their own story/ life.

Till the end even the boys didn't know everything about each other. They became close so they merely shared what they wouldn't usually share.

Now I'd like to focus on what was going through my mind when I started building the arcs. I started with Jimin, who I thought the readers could relate to the most, then Taehyung who also felt understandable to many readers. As the arcs devolved into another it kept becoming complex, until it ended in Hoseok and Jungkook which blew many away.

I had everyone's story planned except for Hoseok, whom I pondered on for a long while.

I really wanted to portray more mental illnesses in my stories. I've had suicidal characters and characters with depression, and social anxiety before. (Twelve hours till death, midnight advisor, online crush)

I wanted to write more. Last year I had a one year course on psychology and started to think this platform needed more stories where we talk about other illnesses. I started with borderline personality disorder because that's what I know a lot about for personal reasons.

I did more research anyway, and I asked around in my social medias. It was surprising to see that many people didn't know a disorder called BPD existed, many didn't believe in its authenticity, a few said borderline people are scary (they are actually but it's not their fault).

Society calls BPD patients a 'freak'. Even other patients with mental disorders don't like them. I've made Hoseok very 'different' or what some would say, because people have a notion that BPD patients are always so cold, and gloomy, and angry. They can be nice if they try.

BPD is a very real disorder, and is more common than you think. Sadly, it is not popular worldwide in terms yet, like schizophrenia, OCD or other illnesses. Till to this day it often goes misdiagnosed. It is a bit similar to bipolar disorder but they are not the same.