Goodbye to Adolescence

For many, I believe they will consider their adolescence as one of the best periods they have ever experienced. But for me, things were a bit different.

In my story, you won’t hear someone talking about how he defeated the depression in his mind. You won’t hear someone bragging about his toughness while he was fighting against his crisis. Instead, this is the story of a confused, pathetic man who tries to look at his traumatic past. This is also the story of someone showing the pain and suffering he has been bearing on himself. If in front of his memories he is a victim of look at his past, he is also a victim of his own thoughts.

To begin with, I think we shall look at the beginning of everything, the first occasion when there are things in my mind going wrong.

1. A failed suicide

My story starts back when I was 10 years old, the time when my mind started to travel on the wrong side of the track.

Back then, I was a primary 4 student who got extremely depressed out of no reason. There was nothing wrong that happened to either my family members or my physical health. I didn’t know what the word ‘suicide’ meant, and I had no idea what the concept of committing suicide refers to. I just had this practice of thinking about leaving this world.

In fact, there was an occasion when I almost killed myself.

It happened a few days before that year’s Christmas. I was at school, attending the annual Christmas celebration party. On that day, while the classroom was being redecorated with strings of tinsels and Christmas balls hanging above our heads, many of my classmates’ parents had prepared snacks for the whole class, from plates of pineapple sausages and potato chips to large bottles of soft drinks. It was a day of celebration for everyone, except me. While my classmates and teachers were enjoying their snack, I was neither interested to see my classmates exchanging gifts with one another, nor to stuff some foods and drinks into my stomach. Instead, I was quietly sitting at the back of the classroom, looking like someone who was living on his own planet.

All of a sudden, my mind was occupied by an idea: Why don’t I just take a leap, and leave everything behind?

I took a glance at my classmates and the teachers to see if they were noticing my behaviour. After that, I slowly walked out of the room, and started walking towards the end of the long, narrow yet empty corridor. At the end of the corridor, I saw a barrier around 70 centimetres tall (with railings installed on top). I leaned my head forward to see what would be waiting for me. There was nothing but a huge playground built with orange-red bricks.

I told myself: This is perfect. Grab the railing, hop over the barrier, and the four stories drop should be enough. How hard can it be?

I tried to raise my right hand to grab the railing. When I could almost place my hand on the railing, all of a sudden, I felt a hand that grabbed the collar of my shirt and was trying to pull me away. It was such a powerful and brutal pull, I had no opportunity to grab the railing and resist the pull, nor the opportunity to balance my body as I was falling down. I fell on the floor. I was being brutally dragged on the rough rock tiles as the barrier became further, and further, away.

When I got into the classroom, I was thrown into the corner of the classroom. I turned around. It was Phil, one of my class teachers, who pulled me away from the barrier. I took a glance at his face. He was staring at me, his eyebrows pointing towards the middle while oriented downwards. Phil did not say anything to me, not a phrase or question. He returned to his seat, sat down, and continued to eat his plate of snacks.

There were a few tears in my eyes. I did not choose the option of giving up. I sat in my seat for a few minutes, then I dashed out of the classroom again. This time, when I was still a few steps from the railing, Phil has already grabbed the collar of my shirt and started pulling me away. He dragged me back to the classroom and threw me into the same corner. As I bowed in front of the wooden chair, I lost the courage of trying. I sat on the floor, and I started crying like a three-year-old. While there were tears flowing all the way down my cheeks, Phil sat in the opposite corner of the room, enjoying his plate of snack, talking to his colleagues, as if nothing has happened.

For the next two and half years, Phil was still my class teacher. After what happened at that Christmas party, we barely talked to each other. We treated each other as if we did not know each other very well. Phil never asked about my situation at the time, and we never talked about what exactly happened on that occasion.

2. Meetings with school social workers

In the earlier times of my adolescence, I developed some sort of a love-hate relationship with school social workers. At first, I trusted the school social workers, and I did not find the counselling process unbearable. As I grew up, I gradually realized that the social workers were incapable of helping me.

I remember when I was a primary school student. I was told to have meetings with the school social worker, a lady who was working for the Boys’ and Girls’ Club Association. I have no idea why I was being sent to have meetings with her. (When I look back, I guess it was because of what happened in that Christmas party.) I followed the order. I remember where we usually met, a small multi-purpose classroom located in the corner of the campus. On the right-hand side of the room, there was a large whiteboard hanging on the wall. On both the left-hand side and the back of the room, there were windows, protected by strong aluminium grilles, showing the scenery outside. While I was meeting the school social worker, I could see the blue sky, and feel the warmth of the sun. It was one of the most pleasant and satisfying experiences I have ever had.

When I started studying in secondary school, the school arranged for me to have counselling meetings with the school social worker. (I guess that’s because the school still identified me as someone who might be mentally unstable.) To be honest, their predictions were largely correct. While I was trying to adapt to the life of studying in an ‘EMI’ school (in case you don’t know, that means the kind of school that uses English as the teaching language). I was getting more worried about my life in school. Back then, everybody considered their individual achievement the most important thing. I was a below-average student, and I was getting the worst scores in tests and exams (like just barely passing an exam…). I wanted to work harder on my studies, but my learning progress was falling behind the rest of the class. As my mind kept putting pressure on itself, I was heading towards being overwhelmed by the depression inside me.

In the meantime, as I grew up, my thoughts have become more complex and abstract than before. I started to fill my brain with nothing but skepticism. I started to become doubtful about many things, including the routine counselling with school social workers. I started to notice how every meeting would happen during religion class, which was something I appreciated. In the meantime, however, I also noticed that the meetings were executed like a regular procedure. Every meeting was conducted in the same order, the same pattern. I became more familiar with the experience. The conversation was just wriggling around certain themes or issues (unfortunately I forgot what they actually were), and I noticed that the school social worker was just someone who was willing to listen. Beyond those meetings, there was nothing that they could do, or they could try to do, for you. They were usually away from school. When they were working at my school, they were busy with their work. They were there to serve the interest of many other stakeholders, but not me.

I was also getting more uncomfortable with the idea of talking to another person about myself. While I was overwhelmed by the stress and tension constructed around me, I was gradually engaging in a form of self-entrapment, in which I have forced myself to handle every bit of emotions and feelings on my own. I noticed that those routine meetings were neither helping me nor capable of helping me. They were there to serve the interest of the school or the interest of themselves… They were there for everyone else, except someone like me.

In Secondary 3, I reached the point when I completely changed my attitude against the thing. At the beginning of that year, the social worker in my school was gone, and another social worker took the position. To me, he was a douchebag. He was pretending to be someone who was friendly and knowledgeable. His weird sense of humour, his cunning smugness, his pretentious approach… no, it was impossible for me to sit down and talk to him. I remember when he suddenly talked about physiognomy:

I know a bit about Chinese Physiognomy. You know what, I can tell that when you become an adult, won’t have a lot of money in your pocket. You know why? Your nose wings are too thin. Trust me, you won’t make a fortune.

How was I supposed to react? Stand up and start clapping my hands? Praise him for being such a ‘knowledgeable’ social worker? Tell him that he should get rid of his current job and be a fortune-teller instead?

I could not bear with the idea of attending these routine meetings anymore. I did not want to sit down and talk with somebody I felt very uncomfortable talking to. Instead, I was rather happy to be let alone, and have these things out of my radar. I changed my attitude towards these meetings. The whole thing became a twisted version of ‘hide-and-seek’ between me, who decided to show a fake portrait of myself, and that social worker. I was engaging in the conversation, while I was hiding my emotions behind my face, my voice and my language. I was slightly abnormal, but I was pretending to be just slightly abnormal. I was pretending to be someone who was just a bit problematic and was going to become mentally stable very soon. In the meetings, I did not talk about anything that made me felt suicidal or melancholic. I did not talk about things that might show me as someone who was emotionally unstable. Instead, I portrayed myself as a normal, healthy student who did not have the intention of hurting myself, who did not have the potential of damaging the reputation of my school.

At last, I was let free. When I started to study in secondary 4, I no longer received any message asking me to have meetings with the school social worker. I was happy to stop wasting my time on such activity and to keep everything to myself. As I turned to a new chapter of life, though, the trauma inside me did not stop growing. As I stepped onto another journey of pain and suffering, it becomes bigger and bigger.

3. A slave of credentialism, an unsociable weirdo

If the disappearance of the school social worker from my life marks the beginning of my downfall (because I refused a cure of himself), the experience of living within an inappropriate form of culture became a journey that turned me into this pathetic, unsociable weirdo.

Before I started to study in Secondary 4, I did not know that for the next three years, I would be unwillingly made to live in a system that I could barely fit into. I was not a person who easily made decisions against my will and ego. But in those three years, I had to stand against my will, and become a slave who was overwhelmed by ideologies of credentialism. Back then, my life was filled with nothing but the repetition of patterns and routines: in the weekdays, you went to school, where the teachers, apart from teaching what the curriculum was designed to offer, would either give you examination papers to work on before you met them again tomorrow or other practices for you could drill on during the lesson. After school, you either went to attend the extra lessons given by those famous tutors, or you went straight back home to work on the extra practices, or on the notes you received when attending those extra lessons. Fed up with one subject? No worries. You could always work on the past papers and exercises on the other subjects that you were also studying. You worked until dinner, when you gave your brain a break, trying to fill up your stomach. You continued your work until midnight, when you needed to start getting some sleep so that you could make through the same routine again when you woke up.

Within those three years, I spent most of my time following this schedule. I did not have a vacation, where my mind did not think about the public exam, the exercises I forgot to finish, or the mock papers that I was revising over and over again. While I was rushing towards the examination, as if on too many steroids, I was naïve enough to ignore my own feelings, and force myself to be completely dedicated to my preparation for the public exam. I was naïve enough to sacrifice the opportunity of joining clubs, participating in activities, developing my own hobbies, making new friends…so that I could satisfy different people’s expectation on my academic achievement.

I was naïve enough to sacrifice whatever I might have in exchange for such obnoxious experience. I was naïve enough to be an idiot without knowing it.

When I finished the public examination, I felt as if I’d fallen into a black hole. For the first time in my life, I felt a clear sense of hollowness, of getting completely lost. After six years of secondary education, there were many questions I could not give an answer to. I had no idea what I would like to study, what was my dream job, and what type of career I would pursue. I had no idea what was my dream, what my future could be, where I would be in a few years’ time. I had no idea what I could be, and I had no idea what I could possibly do for myself. It became a crisis of personal identity and future.

Apart from being a temporary slave of credentialism, those were the days when I gradually departed from having the life of being a normal teenager. While other students were playing sports or computer games with their classmates, hanging out with their friends on weekends or vacations, I was travelling between home and school, studying what I was supposed to study, practising what I was supposed to know, preparing for what everyone else focused on. While I was sitting at the back of the classroom, I was neither interested in making new friends, nor interested in having fun with my classmates. I was not interested in playing with mobile phones during lessons, chit-chatting with my neighbours, or playing tricks on people who did not mind to be fooled. I tried to maintain some distance from my teachers and classmates. I gradually got used to the experience of living with the sense of loneliness in my mind. Little by little, it becomes part of my character I cannot get rid of. It becomes a dominant trait that affects the way I live.

Of course, those were the days when I was looking for things that would allow me to displace my pressure, and help me to just grow the hell up. While other teenagers from my generation fell in love with the popular culture at the time, I fell in love with old-fashioned psychedelic music and films. Pink Floyd, The Doors. Without their music, I wonder whether I could have made it through the repetitions I have lived through. Their music was an outlet. It displaced the anger I suppressed deep inside my mind. I started watching trippy films, even if they did not belong to my generation. I was astonished by the mysteriousness, the psychedelic qualities. When the school curriculum failed to teach us about the reality of humanity, I learnt about the darkness, the complexity of humanity in movies like ‘The Wall’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. Without the experience of watching these films, I wonder whether I would have made it through those difficult times, and become the person I am.

When I look at my past, though, instead of being proud of myself for being so ‘edgy’ and ‘cool’, I cannot stop from looking at things from a pessimistic perspective.

Why did I not choose to study in the neighbouring school, or at least try to flee from class, leave the campus, and enjoy the rest of the day without following the schedule?

Why did I sit in the classroom, and listen to teachers, who were incapable in their job, as the lesson went on and on and on?

Why did I spend every moment of my life working way too hard? Why didn’t I take my time, and spend more time to appreciate the wonderful things around me?

Everything has already become the past. For now, I can do nothing but regret the things I have missed, to cry on the irreversibility of reality, and consider myself one of the most terrible jokes existed on earth. While others look back and talk about their first relationship, their experience of hanging out with their friends, and doing crazy, embarrassing things together, I can do nothing but remain silent. While I have indoctrinated myself to dedicating my body and soul into the wild fest of examinations and practices, I became one of those who did not spend his time to make more friends, to do whatever I want, to be the sort of person I could be, or to experience the kinds of things that many others have experienced. I will never be one of those who can share the same experience of adolescence with most people in my generation. I will never be one of those who has any interesting coming-of-age experience in his adolescence. I will never become those who got to grow up as a normal teenager. I guess for the rest of my life, I can do nothing but to look at the gap that separates me from the rest of the crowd. I can do nothing but to look against myself with a sense of inferiority, and I can do nothing but to fantasize the pleasure of being a normal teenager back then.

4. A man whose mind is in tumult

As I am reaching the end of my adolescence, I am trying to forget many of the bad things that exist in my memory. Yet, the harder I try to take away my memory of the past, the better my mind seems to remember about the past.

Since my graduation from the primary school, I have chosen to disconnect myself completely from Phil, with the hope that I will eventually forget about this guy. I never contacted him, never saw him (not even on the streets). I never heard anything about him, and I treated him as a character that has never existed in my life. But I cannot erase my memory of what happened in that Christmas party. I cannot forget how brutal he was when he pulled me away and dragged me to the ground. I cannot forget the way he treated as if nothing has happened to me after all. I cannot forget the fact that he did not show any sort of compassion or care for this pathetic little creature. Back then I was saddened by his lack of compassion and care. Now, I am very disappointed by his attitude back then.

In fact, there are many other things that I cannot forget about my adolescence. I cannot forget the torture, the suffering, the unbearable things I have experienced. I cannot forget the wrong decisions I made, the wrong attitudes I have taken with me, when I was growing up during adolescence. I cannot stop my mind from judging my failure, and I cannot stop it from blaming myself. I cannot stop the sense of pain that is constantly stabbing my soul, and I cannot go back to the past and change everything. I miss the beautiful scenery outside of the classroom, but I also dislike the mistakes which I have made in the past.

I want to die. I want to restart everything. I wish I could be a sociable figure! I wish I could experience what I have not experienced back then. But I have already lost the courage of committing suicide. I just can’t be an irresponsible douchebag.

I have no idea what to do… I have no idea what to say… I… I…

There are occasions when I cannot stop myself from being jealous against those who made a lot of friends during the age of adolescence. There are occasions when I cannot stop blaming myself for making my life so miserable. There are occasions when I am lying on my bed, and my mind starts to imagine the scene of me jumping down a building and fell on the surface of our planet. There are occasions when I want to put much more care into the things around me, and there are occasions when I don’t want to care about anything at all. There are occasions when I want to tell myself to grow the hell up, and there are occasions when I want to admit that I am mentally sick.

A suicidal dream is still mesmerizing my mind. An indecisive man is still controlling my body and soul. An uncertain future is waiting for me to explore. A troubled past, however, has become a burden for my soul to carry with it.

Wong Kar Wai was right. ‘Man’s greatest problem is that he remembers.’