AnYi 安亦

*Trigger warning: mentions of depression and suicide, very chaotic and intense emotions. *

Many a summer afternoon in May 2015 found me walking away from the filthy-green, algae-covered school pond, an irritably stubborn contrast to the joyful families of wild ducks celebrating new births in the water. It was a sweet, heartbreakingly beautiful sight, and I almost laughed with the sheer irony of it. The pond had called to me several times, in clear, mad whisper, a temptation too great and too bitter to bear, but I broke away. I was trembling, broken, mindless, despaired to the point of suicide, deprived of all my motive power and my will to work, and probably a danger to myself as well as others. Little else was left. There was a dark streak of humour about all this, a bunch of forgotten roses, and that was all I had.

I probably wouldn’t have called myself lucky while contemplating suicide — a carefully, beautifully constructed plan, checked over and over with a kind of meticulousness rarely seen in me — and looking down into the depths of the rippling pond. Depression was perhaps the most terrible thing to have happened, and it had been a fear that coiled up in me from time to time for years, but it came anyway, with no warning or sense. What kind of luck was that? All I knew was that my world turned black and whirled out of focus overnight, got steadily worse each day, until I could no longer tell reality from nightmares, and every day became a slow, maddening torture, eating me bits by bits, towards the point when I feared I would have to give in.

I was reading Nino Cipri’s blog post about their encounter with depression before I started writing this, and they say in the post that it “stained everything.” The same went with my life at the point—the constant gloom stained my relationships with the bunch of friends who have always stood by me, stained those with my parents which had already been intense and, simply put, shitty. It destroyed all my hopes for preparation for the college entrance exam, and with it a whole lot of my dreams and ambitions, too, precisely three months before it took place. All attempts at working failed miserably, and I could barely function like a normal human being without turning every friendly face into deadly foes and imagining massacres in my mind. Eventually I stopped trying to study, slipped out of half my classes to keep myself from harming innocent people, and fought for the appearance of normality in the other half. Emotions, raw and stinging, would overwhelm all of a sudden, threatening to crack down the fragile walls I had rebuilt so many times around me. Mission: Look Normal and Act Normal became Mission Impossible, and though I had toilet cubicles and school woods as my favourite hiding places whenever I felt the need, other people were bound to notice.

That was when all hope was truly gone, the exactly point when one realized how everyone else, caring and kind and helpful though they were, were moving on with cheerfulness and hard work, with ambitions and goals to reach, leaving me stuck in the seemingly irreversible blackness that was my life. I felt, the same way as Nino did, like a monster. The only one who couldn’t handle her own feelings and knock some sense into her stubborn head while there was the biggest exam in life going on. The only one who fought sadness and despair with such force but was still failing most pathetically, drowning in petty troubles, breaking her heart over unimportant things. Guilt was burning to the bones, though I hardly understood what it was or why it needed to be there. Living was unbearable because I was unbearable even to myself.

I thought a lot about life and death over the weeks. Though educated as an atheist, I was always curious about the Unknown forces that are said to have power over humans’ lives. Most of the time it was an intriguing theory, but I’m not a very good atheist, and at the time I clung to the thought in despairing tiredness – if the gods, or whatever they were called, truly existed, if there were such forces as can control the ups and downs in a human’s life, would they be bothered to see to it that life is fair? Or would they simply smile over the little dramas ad follies we conjured up for ourselves? Because at that moment I felt so utterly undeserving of the privileges that I had. I was wasting away my education, ungrateful for the shelter and food my parents provided for me, and resentful against the whole world when it’d been nothing but kind to me. Beyond reason and sense, I longed for a welcomed death, knowing it couldn’t be the solution to but the beginning of all problems, and even took perverse joy in that prospect, if I still understood what joy was. There was a childish impulse, and I kept asking myself: if I could trade my life with someone truly willing to live, someone who was hard-working and positive, and had a purpose in life, would I do it, when my own life felt like such a waste of kindness and goodwill? But it was merely a thought, a feeble consolation, not even an attempt at finding the meaning of living. It was unfair, perhaps, that someone like me was still living a sheltered life while kind, clever children were killed by bombs far away, but then when is it ever fair, and why does it have to be?

I couldn’t answer that then. All I had was wretched feeling, and I tried so hard to get rid of that.

The one thing that put off my taking action of the suicide plan was, oddly enough, the weird kind of humour I have always had. I couldn’t, like dear old Maud wrote, “revel in self-pity”, nor could I happily accept the fact that I was suffering and show off about it. I couldn’t help seeing how ridiculous it all was, how laughable my petty troubles were, how pathetically deep I was sinking. I was yet to come across Nino’s brilliant way of putting it: “This was one of the problems of being a writer. You couldn’t just feel like shit; you had to give dimensions to the shit, note the shit’s qualities down in excruciating detail. After all, suffering made great creative fodder.” (See Like A Lonely House.) Simple truth. I aborted my great, tragic suicide plan halfway, walked away from the pond, and wrote it all out in a story. After that it sounded too dramatic to be realized anyway. I couldn’t bear a literary fault turned real in life.

Something happened, though, before I decided not to listen to the wild roars telling me to kill myself. I was on the brink of the pond when I saw the roses. Pink and snowy white, the twelve of them were craftily tied with matching ribbons, lying forgotten on the edge of the flowerbeds beside the pond. I was shocked into inaction by their breathing beauty—the first real roses I had ever laid my eyes upon. Perhaps it was a rejected gift from a lover, or a prop dumped after a photo shoot (quite a number of people did their wedding photo shoots in my old school). To me it was a sign. I picked them up and walked back, kissed them with sudden awareness of everything around me, thankful that I was alive to witness such wonderful beauty.

It wasn’t all roses after that, of course, contrary to how the movies like to tell it. I still had difficult times when suicide sounded like the only way out, and the problems with working normally lasted till the exam. The whole experience did destroy a lot of chances for me, and the hurt I caused must have cut deep in those whom I loved best, and it left lingering scars even when I recovered. In one sense this was the most unfortunate thing that has ever happened to me, but in another it was also the most fortunate. I was lucky to have teachers that knew not to push me over the edge. My family, though not understanding and causing a lot of damage along the way (as much as I have caused them), learned at last to at least try to avoid intervening too much. My friends offered me company till the very end, despite the wretched idiot I was being. The whole thing helped shape what I am today, making me a little, if at all, wiser and older, even if I am still fairly naive and childish most of the time. And most importantly, I survived. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever accomplished. Like Nino says, survival is worth celebrating. Therefore, it is a lucky thing.

Depression had me fight myself to shattered pieces, battling against it, till survival itself almost killed me, but I won still. It was all I had.

*I wrote this when I was 19, a year after my first serious depression attack and about a month before the second. It’s not very good writing, to be honest, and I get second-hand embarrassment looking at it myself, but I thought it might be worthwhile sharing that experience. Four years later, I still can’t answer a lot of the questions that were troubling me at the time, and life still puts in a note every once in while that says ‘Fuck you, I’m going to be difficult and sad and gloomy now’, but it’s also good, mediocre, and most magically wonderful in-between. As for where I am now — still fighting, still loving, with all I have. *