Akari

Good morning — I am Kasumi, from Liuzhou, Guangxi. Right now I am a freshman studying in the northeast. Just an ordinary university student.

I am originally from Liuzhou, Guangxi, and moved to Nanning for middle school.

During primary school, a combination of family and school factors left me with quite a bit of trauma. Years later I still remember things like being pushed into the bathroom and bullied, my belongings thrown in there. It got so bad that I could not even understand elementary-school math, and I was once taken for an IQ test (I still vaguely remember sitting in front of a computer screen in what I think was a hospital, doing something like a matching-and-spotting-the-difference game). I passed in the end — probably a waste of money.

My personality was largely shaped during those years. I already preferred being alone. I remember one time I got in trouble at school and was too scared to go home because I would be beaten, and if a teacher found me I would be kept behind and scolded. So I hid under a table in what I think was a meeting room, ate nothing for hours, and only came out when I had no other choice.

Those primary-school years left me with serious psychological scars and drove me to spend almost all my time online, tinkering with computers and phones. After getting through that dead time I entered middle school, and in the first year my family fell apart again — daily arguments, talk of divorce. The whole mess nearly destroyed me; neither school nor home felt safe, and I came to resent any form of family affection. Just thinking about it now still makes my head heat up.

Skipping over a lot of wasted time: it was not until the second semester of eighth grade that I started making peace with myself. First, I began taking sertraline (an antidepressant), which gave me a little breathing room. Second, after the second class reshuffle I met a wonderful homeroom teacher and good classmates. The teacher was very tolerant once she saw my state, and would even call me into the office to encourage me. She fed me quite a few motivational speeches.

A few classmates actively invited me to hang out, tell stories, and chat, instead of mocking me for being useless. After that I began studying hard, trying to break out of the vicious cycle. That learning journey could fill a long story (self-study, teacher tutoring, classmates helping), but by ninth grade I was doing quite well. I remember my best subjects on the high-school entrance exam were math and English; my worst was chemistry.

After a series of events I would rather skip, I was admitted to a key high school but placed in an ordinary class. During my first week I tried to "turn over a new leaf" — no medication, no staying online all day. By the end of that week I was nearly destroyed, so I just went back to what felt natural.

My three years of high school could fill a long essay, but in short: in the first year I was aimless and ended up choosing the humanities track on impulse (because I was bad at chemistry, even though my physics and biology were very good — one of the biggest regrets of my life). From the second year I started working hard. Those three years completely reshaped the first nineteen years of my life, largely because I kept taking medication and, in the second year, started taking fish oil and a bunch of supplements (they actually worked — I am not exaggerating).

Those medications flattened all my emotions. I lost interest in everything and forgot what real happiness felt like. Even things like school trips, amusement parks, exploring restaurants, club activities, and socialising — none of it appealed to me in the slightest; I simply could not understand the point. But I noticed that when I scored well on exams, teachers praised me, classmates admired me, people talked about me in the hallways, and even relatives changed their opinion of me. So I became addicted to studying. For all three years of high school my joy came from learning, and my most exhilarating moments were when exam rankings were posted. I remember scoring over 100 in math by the second year, and about the same in English. Later I found textbooks and online courses on my own and discovered they were genuinely interesting, so studying turned into a hobby.

This positive feedback loop pushed my scores up by dozens of points within months and led me to discover how fascinating mathematics — and, secondarily, economics — really are (in middle school I had preferred computer science and psychology). I was a bit obsessive: lying in bed trying to fall asleep, I would still be solving problems in my head. I also had a good homeroom teacher in high school who was tolerant and gave me plenty of freedom, so life was comfortable.

My overall feeling of those three years is that the pressure was enormous at every moment — sometimes so intense I felt like throwing up — yet studying itself made me happy. I even became a lighthouse for others: as I once recalled in a post, a classmate would stay behind after every evening study session to walk with me, and we would encourage each other. It was nice.

There is certainly much more I could write about my memoir. But whenever I try to recall these things, my head overheats and triggers hypomania, so I think I will stop. I barely pulled through. Another thread is that my family as a whole has been in decline, and that thread is painful too — but I will leave it here.

Since starting university, honestly, I have rarely been happy. My emotional state mostly oscillates between calm, hypomania, and depression. I prefer the calm — no emotions at all, including happiness — because at least it means I do not have to spend energy suppressing anything. That is fine.