The Way to Break Depression

Since childhood, I have felt that life had no meaning. When I was three years old, I talked to the drainage ditch and the insects inside it, building houses for them and telling them how to crawl according to my arrangement. I thought my mother could appear and walk out instantly from holes in space. Because I grew up at my grandmother’s house, and she was a person who seldom spoke, I could only talk to insects, chickens, and dogs. My grandmother only made sure I did not starve and that I went to the toilet. This caused me, for a long time after starting school, to not understand what other people were saying. Many people thought I looked nice but was not very smart—like a doll. But this also trained my ability to observe. I could sharply perceive the language beyond others’ words. If a person added spoken language to that, I could roughly judge their character. But I also made mistakes. I once thought a plump, gentle-looking aunt who spoke softly to me was kind, but she deceived and used me, almost causing my family to be implicated under suspicion of taking bribes.

My family members were very united. When I grew older, every one of them acted as my parent. They all wanted to guide my life. At first, I felt it was a kind of support, but later, as I grew up, I saw that being directed by others gradually leaves one with no choice but to obey, eventually being forced to cling to the last straw and living days where one does not want to live even one more day. I wondered: does the future they pointed me to necessarily mean it is good? What they think is good—will I think so? Will they always act for my good? And when ten or twenty years pass, when they no longer have the ability to arrange a good life for me, will I also lack the ability to change my circumstances?

Thus I ran around crashing into everything, refusing to follow anyone’s rules, even deliberately doing things the opposite way. But in the first ten years of making my own decisions, there were hardly any good outcomes, and sometimes the results were extraordinarily bad. At that time, every day I tried to invent something, but I didn’t know how to implement it. I thought becoming an adult would allow me to realize my wishes, but even in my twenties, I still lacked the ability and still couldn’t solve problems. After some plain attempts that brought no new feeling, life remained unchanged, so I decided to live until thirty and then die. Because deciding blindly earlier might lead to regret, and since I was still in school, there was absolutely no chance to change my situation while still being a student.

Later, in Paris, I met a roommate - Lydia. We both carried a heavy sense of death, though hers manifested as violently abusing herself. She read the ten or so huge CAF books three times—not to pass exams, but to inflate her score to push out the average scorers, letting fewer people pass. She ate the same flavor of pizza every day. My sense of death was lying down anywhere, watching what different people were doing, and worrying whether I really had to die at thirty. I told her, “I want to do something grand and intense, fully experience life, and then die at thirty.” She asked, “Have you done anything specific that could make your life grand and intense?” I thought for a moment—no. That proved I probably couldn’t accomplish anything by thirty, and therefore had no qualification to die.

(What’s inside these parentheses is the method to break depression. A lot is omitted here—maybe it takes years, maybe decades. I think these are its methods. I talked with my friend Gaëlle; she said that when she was young, she truly did not understand. Only after enough years accumulated did things become easier. So perhaps the solution is the accumulation laid down by time.)

Now in my thirties, I still have many ideas each day, just like when I was a child. But after growing up, these ideas can actually be realized. My ability to solve problems has improved, and the process of turning whimsical ideas into reality has become realistic. Now I absolutely do not want to die. I feel I still have many things I want to do, and each day is new and interesting.