Original date: 2016-04-23, based on the recoverable Wayback Machine snapshot
Content note: this historical post mentions severe insomnia and suicidal thoughts. It is a personal record, not health advice. Anyone in immediate danger should contact local emergency services or a qualified crisis service.
Ten years earlier, I began to write about people and events around me. Unfortunately, I was near the top of my class, and my head teacher believed I should remain on the path to academic distinction. In front of the whole class, the teacher tore my writing notebook into pieces. I collected the fragments, fitted them together, and taped the pages one by one. That notebook was probably my dream.
In my third year of middle school, I begged my father to buy me a laptop. I used it to begin a fantasy novel, but stopped after about 120,000 Chinese characters. Staying up every night changed writing from pleasure into pain. My parents did not encourage it, and I successfully persuaded myself to quit.
My insomnia worsened in high school. I stayed up too often and felt exhausted. In the first monthly exam I ranked somewhere beyond 500 in the year. My father said he would stop paying attention to my scores. That did not hurt as much as one might expect: across many major exams in middle school I had missed first place only four times, and rank no longer brought joy.
My family did not know about the insomnia because I refused to talk. I did not want my parents to worry. I tried many ways to force sleep, from counting countless sheep to staring at a lamp until dawn. The situation continued for more than two years.
I felt miserable and trapped and had suicidal thoughts, yet still would not tell anyone. I took medicine secretly and did not seek a proper examination. A physics teacher said I had neurasthenia. I did not understand what that meant and assumed I was finished; I imagined disappearing quietly rather than becoming a burden.
In the school’s only liberal-arts experimental class, my roommates fell asleep while listening to New Concept English compositions. As the person who often read aloud, I could only envy them. In less than two weeks, the buttons on the little MP3 player we used for text files broke.
The player belonged to the student in the bunk below mine. He looked like a fifth grader and had placed second in the county entrance exam. I remember a story about his father saying proudly that his son had done reasonably well. A taxi driver laughed and said his own daughter had placed first. She really had. That was the first joke I remember from high school. The other roommates were also strong students, mostly in the county’s top twenty. The boy and I became a little closer because he collected stamps and I helped him buy an album online.
Eventually I could no longer tolerate the head teacher and transferred classes. After leaving a room so quiet that nobody spoke during breaks, life began to change. I found a setting in which I could speak. I argued with teachers, often inelegantly, and as a low-ranked student somehow made lessons livelier. As my disruptive influence grew, the class’s results fell as well.
Many other interesting things happened, but they must wait for another time.
It is awkward that my first post contains so many awkward stories. I have to go to the company now, so I will stop here.
One reader asked for more details about the teacher.
The author replied with several incidents: being criticised both for not taking notes and for taking notes instead of listening; being ordered to refold a quilt repeatedly without inspection; and seeing a student’s MP3 player broken and thrown from an upper floor. The author said there were more stories to tell later.