The False Self and the Patchwork Essay

I suppose it started in elementary school, when I was told I couldn’t just write “I had fun at the park” — I had to include “but Mom was so tired.” That was when I first felt the absurdity of it all.

Not the kind of absurdity that makes you laugh. Something deeper. You genuinely had a good time — the sun was shining, the ice cream wasn’t melting, kids you didn’t know were running across the grass. But you couldn’t just write that. You had to add: Mom was dozing off on the bench beside you, because she was so exhausted. If you didn’t add that line, the teacher said you weren’t writing an essay — you were writing a log. If you added it, the teacher said: good.

The first time I wrote “but Mom was so tired,” I had no idea whether Mom was actually tired. I just knew that adding this line would get me through. That was probably the first conscious lie of my life. Not the “I didn’t steal the cookies” kind of lie — that one was to avoid getting scolded. This one was different. The cost of this lie wasn’t punishment. It was something more insidious: if you didn’t say it, you’d be rejected. If you didn’t perform this kind of thoughtfulness, your writing wasn’t “meaningful” enough. You learned. All kids learned.

Then came the gaokao essay. If you spread twenty years of gaokao model essays side by side, you’d notice an interesting pattern: they all use roughly the same structure, the same historical references, the same characters. Qu Yuan has been pacing by the Miluo River for twenty years. Sima Qian’s castration has been invoked by candidates from different graduating classes more times than Sima Qian himself ever wrote about. Tao Yuanming’s chrysanthemums bloom every year. Su Dongpo’s equanimity gets quoted more than his actual poems. Nobody really cares what Qu Yuan was actually thinking. They just need his drowning to prove that “integrity matters.”

The problem isn’t the quoting. The problem is: when did the core spirit of writing degenerate into the “patchwork essay” — where “patchwork” isn’t about assembling a good essay, but literally about snapping together pieces that have been pre-certified as “good.” Qu Yuan is good. Sima Qian is good. Hard work is good. Perseverance is good. Gratitude is good. You snap them together, and even if you haven’t written a single genuine feeling, you get points. You might even get top marks.

In Donald Winnicott’s terms, that was when my false self was born.

Winnicott said everyone has a true self and a false self. The true self is your inner, genuine feelings, impulses, and needs. The false self is a mask you learn to wear as you grow up — you use it to cope with environments that can’t accept who you really are. When the false self grows too strong, it suppresses the true self and eventually lives your life in your place. You look fine. Your grades are good. Your essays satisfy the teacher. But where you are — you don’t know.

Looking back, my false self was probably born when I wrote “Mom was so tired” in elementary school. I didn’t know it was called a false self back then. I only knew that if I didn’t add that line, my writing wouldn’t pass. From elementary school to middle school to the gaokao, the false self grew bigger and more skilled. It knew which classical references scored high, which sentence structures earned praise, which emotions would be validated. Like a well-trained feeder, it stuffed exactly the fodder the examiners wanted into the essay. What I myself was doing — I’m not entirely sure. I just sat in the exam hall, my fingers moving, but those words didn’t feel like mine.

I believe that even a clumsy, poorly written piece that expresses genuine thoughts is a cry let out by someone standing upright. Some of the students who wrote “Mom was so tired” really did have exhausted mothers. Their “but Mom was so tired” wasn’t a snapped-on part — it was something they genuinely felt. That’s fine. But that’s not most of them. Most of the time, “but Mom was so tired” was just a passcode.

Better a floor of real shattered glass than a perfect plastic statue. Shattered glass will cut your feet, but it’s real. You can pick it up, hold it in the light, and watch the colors refract. The plastic statue won’t cut you — it’s smooth, complete, flawless — but it’s plastic. It doesn’t refract anything.

This false self brought with it a serious case of alexithymia — an inability to recognize and express one’s own emotions. You get used to processing everything through the false self, and over time, the passage between the false self and the true self becomes blocked. When you feel an emotion, you don’t know its name. You just know you’re uncomfortable, but you can’t tell whether it’s sadness, anger, or emptiness. You can only feel that discomfort, like a muffled sound in a sealed jar, buzzing — but you can’t open the jar. Meaning is drained out. The void behind the words becomes terrifying. When you discover that your inner feelings have no value — or more precisely, no value that this world will recognize — you sink into extreme nihilism.

This prolonged cognitive dissonance eventually evolves into a deeper inner death. If the real me was never allowed to exist, how can the one behind the mask find any peace? The false self lives your life for you. Waking up. Eating. Taking exams. Working. Socializing. Smiling. But the true self is curled up in some corner, withered, dead. Not a dramatic death. The silent, unnoticed kind of withering you don’t even register.

This year’s gaokao essay was a typical punchline. What else could you possibly write — it goes without saying. You don’t even need to read the prompt to know roughly what was produced. The prompt doesn’t matter; the answer is always Qu Yuan, Sima Qian, Tao Yuanming, Su Dongpo. I despise the gaokao essay from the bottom of my heart. Not because it’s difficult. Because it turns writing into a performance. A performance where everyone knows it’s a performance, and everyone still applauds.

But since middle school, I’ve made a vow: to record and express my real thoughts. Whether I’m writing for myself or sharing it on some unvisited blog, I want to at least reclaim a little of what was lost. Not for anyone to read. Not for high marks. Not to snap together some “good essay.” Just so the true self — the one suppressed by the false self for so many years — can have a few chances to speak.

I look down on their sublimity. Those sublime parts, snapped together. Qu Yuan’s drowning in the Miluo River was not so that candidates twenty years later could prove that “integrity matters.” Sima Qian’s castration was not meant to become essay fodder. I believe true sublimity is nothing like that. True sublimity is when nobody is watching, nobody is grading, nobody is scoring you — and you still choose to stand straight and say a true thing. Even if it’s said clumsily. Even if you’re the only one who hears it.

Even standing before a dark field at night, feeling the darkness and the unknown beyond your field of vision — that shudder, that fascination, that thing you can’t put into words — that too is real. It hasn’t been translated into any high-scoring sentence pattern. It hasn’t been stuffed into any “but Mom was so tired” paragraph. It just stands there. Dark. Unresponsive. But real.

I think, standing before this field, I might have found something again.