It’s a cliche, I know. You hear it time and time again. Depression hurts. But it’s true. It comes and goes as it pleases, and it’s the worst companion a person could have. But I’ve come to the conclusion, that it never leaves for good for some people. And I think I am one of them.
Part of it has to do with the expectations that I place upon myself, some of it has to do with the expectations that others place on me. Most of it is due to my lack of confidence and my tendency to fill myself with self doubt. It sucks. Fuck depression. Like seriously.
I don’t know how else to say it. You can be out having fun with friends. Chilling, talking and having a grand ole time, but someone may say something or do something that completely bums you out, and you don’t know why. That’s depression. You can be talking to a girl you like, and you say something that you didn’t mean. You come on too strong, or you miss your chance, and that tanks your day. That’s depression. You might be met with an overwhelming obstacle and feel like you’re not good enough or inadequate for the job. That’s depression.
It comes in many shapes and sizes, but at the very least it’s consistent. Some days you’ll feel like you’re on top of the world and can conquer anything you put your mind to. But deep down, you know that sometimes it’s too good to be true. Your luck will run out. Maybe this is a self fulfilling prophecy, maybe it’s actually a thing. Oftentimes I find that I purposely fuck up the situation on my own because I don’t believe that I deserve good things. I don’t believe that I am capable of success. I don’t believe that I’m meant to be/get lucky. And the logical part of me tells me that I’m better than this, that I’m capable of great things. The logical part of me constantly reminds me that I’ve made it this far, and all I need to do is believe and take it step by step. The logical side of me pushes me forward, but there’s a constant pushback from the emotional side of me.
I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m sensitive. Overly sensitive in fact. I take each hit hard. I don’t roll well with the punches. I’m not going to blame anyone or anything for it. In the end, it’s all up to me and my willpower. No one will take care of me, love me, or look out for me better than myself. I’m not going to make any excuses, but I am going to make an explanation.
Sure, I grew up in a Chinese middle class family in an affluent suburb of Boston. I grew up with Jewish kids and privileged white folk. I didn’t grow up into poverty, I didn’t grow up black. I didn’t have learning disabilities. I didn’t grow up in an abusive family or a single parent home. I grew up normal. In all senses of the word (except maybe my personality). But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have my struggles. Cause I sure as hell did. I’m not going to sit here and say that I grew up troubled or deprived, cause I didn’t.
I grew up depressed, and that’s the fairest way to put it. I don’t know what happened or what went wrong, but something did along the way. Being the middle child and the only boy, I did what any regular kid did. I terrorized my sisters, and curiosity got the better of me. I got blamed for things that I did, and things that I didn’t do. I was a mama’s boy, and never really had a relationship with my dad (I still don’t really). According to my mom, she and my dad always tried to schedule one-on-one time with each child. Every time my dad tried to schedule a date with me, I always shunned him. I had this ill-advised notion that he hated me and that I would never be the son he wanted. Maybe it had something to do with the nearly 40 year age gap between me and him. Maybe I felt like I wasn’t good enough for him or didn’t live up to his standard.
I don’t know. I honestly don’t. Maybe this is where it went wrong. I didn’t understand him, and he didn’t understand me. We’re two completely different people, and we might never share any interests. And I guess that didn’t resonate with either of us until too many years had passed. But I mean, it’s not just his fault. It’s mine too, maybe even more so. Truth be told, I don’t blame him. One can only try so much. If you’re the one reaching out, and each and every time your son rejects you, you’re eventually going to stop trying right? You can only take rejection so many times from the same person.
That’s where it begins. I hated my dad for a long time. There’s not really any real reason for it. We were different, and sometimes he did have a bit of a temper. He is scientific and logical, I am emotional. He is quiet and reserved, I’ll say anything on my mind. I have no filter. And maybe this hatred eventually morphed into guilt. God knows I always felt guilty about everything.
Growing up, I was a shy kid. I didn’t talk all of Kindergarten. LIKE AT ALL. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. I did not say a single word to anybody the whole first half of the year. I did not acknowledge people when they spoke to me, both teachers and kids. I didn’t so much as stutter or say umm when called upon by the teacher. I was prone to giving blank stares.
When I say that I didn’t have learning disabilities I say that with the caveat that I didn’t have any that I know of. Maybe my disability was emotional distance. You see, I had a best friend growing up. He was a year older than me, but I hung out with him every single day. His mom and my mom were best friends. We went to the same Christian pre-K together for one year, then my younger sister came in the next. However, we lived in different towns, so by the time Kindergarten came along, I went by myself. I was alone, and I had trouble making friends. I was bilingual, and I knew English very well. But no one else knew it.
I’ve once been told that the only responsibility you have in Kindergarten is to make friends. But let me tell you, it just wasn’t easy for me. I was emotionally distant and too scared to say anything. I got nervous every time I was called upon, because I didn’t want to say the wrong answer. Well anyway, long story short I ended up taking a transition class between Kindergarten and 1st Grade. It was a special class called Transition 1. It was offered only in a select few school districts in Pennsylvania. It was shameful for me to talk about even a decade later. But it is what it is. It was geared toward the younger kids in a class who may or may not have been as fully developed as the rest of the class (those born near the beginning of the year). This is where the story began, in my formative years.
My shyness followed me wherever I went for like 15+ years. I never came out of my shell until my freshman year of college. They say each person takes their own time to grow and develop. For me, it probably took longer than most. This is likely what happens when you grow up in a conservative Chinese Christian family. You’re more likely to be sheltered and protected from the world. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You learn and you grow from everything.
You can’t rewind your life, so you just have to roll with it. Let the past remain the past. There’s nothing you can do about it. This is something I didn’t learn for a very long time. I dwelled on the past, and I let thoughts and emotions fester. I held grudges and I took things personally. I still do, to some extent. Most of all, I held onto my guilt. Guilt for things I did, things I didn’t do, things I said, things I didn’t say. Anything and everything. And the church wasn’t good for it. Everything was a guilt trip, and I always felt like a burden to others. I won’t get into it, but the church hurt me deeply and irrevocably. It’s something I find hard to forgive.
But that’s not the point of this post. It first hit me in 6th grade. I held myself to incredibly high standards. I believed that as one of the few Asian Americans growing up in elementary school that I had to be the best at everything. This wasn’t something my parents taught, or something my teachers told me. This was a stereotype that I wanted so hard to believe. But truth be told, I wasn’t as mentally gifted as I kept telling myself. In 6th grade, I got my first C on a Math test, and things went downhill from there. In 7th grade, I had possibly the worst Math teacher in existence, when Pre-Calc is arguably one of the most fundamental parts of mathematics. I got C after C after D after D, even with extra help. Not even Kumon could save my math career. But guess what? I was too stubborn to ask for help. I didn’t understand it the first time she explained it, I didn’t understand it the second time when I asked the teacher in private. After that I just gave up. And I gave up, and I gave up, and I gave up, and I ran away.
This became my defense mechanism. Any difficulty I faced, I turned away from it. I didn’t feel entitled, or have things handed to me. But I have to admit, I did grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. I ran away from every possibility of failure, and my parents allowed me to do it. Each child has their own needs, and should be raised differently. I’m a strong proponent of that, but some children make it hard on their parents. And I was one of them. I craved attention where I felt comfortable, but was too scared to seek out opportunity when I wasn’t. My sisters weren’t like this. I was different. So different that my parents were unsure what to do. They didn’t push me like they did my sisters, it was like life was easy for me. But it wasn’t. My internal struggles always have and always will outweigh my external ones.
I don’t know if pushing me harder would’ve worked out, but that’s just not what was done. I was allowed to run away from my problems. And in doing so, I stunted my own growth for years. My tank of self-motivation was constantly on empty, and that was fine with us apparently. I was too shy, too awkward, and always too much in my head. To be honest, I was also a creep. No one taught me better. My parents never taught me about relationships and the church never taught me. I was pulled out of sex ed cause it was the Christian thing to do. But the teachers allow you to be pulled out, with the expectation that you’re taught these things on your own time. This was not the case for whatever reason.
Well truth be told, I did learn it on my own time. But not on my parents’ time. Curiosity got the better of me and I literally learned this shit from searching Google and watching porn. Not gonna lie. Let’s be clear. That shit is not the greatest of teachers. Porn is a lie. All that shit is fake and scripted. Well anyway, I digress.
This is also where the guilt came from. At Chinese churches they don’t talk about sex, and they don’t talk about mental health. Those were the two greatest flaws that led me down the path that I took. I felt guilty for watching porn, and I beat myself up each time I failed my own expectation to quit, and each time I would come to repent and vow that I would never do it again. This became a vicious cycle of sinning, feeling guilty, repenting, and repeating. Let’s be honest, I was already setting myself up for failure in the first place. NEVER and ALWAYS are things that just don’t happen. It’s literally impossible.
These three factors led to my first tailspin into depression: vicious cycle of guilt, feeling sorry for myself, and lacking self-motivation. Halfway through freshman year of high school, I just fell into a funk. That’s about all I can say about it. I was convinced that the world was about to end soon and that life was meaningless. Don’t ask me why I felt this way, I just did. But I just wasn’t happy, and there was no reason for it. I lacked motivation and energy. It just didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t feel comfortable telling anybody. So I didn’t. I still had trouble making friends up to this point. I was a loner all throughout high school. But that was because I was always in my head.
I would come home from school, play guitar, do homework, eat dinner, and go to bed. That was my day. I listened to metal music that I refused to call screamo, and I wrote poems/lyrics with violent imagery. I was a scene kid.
And looking back on it, that was a bad look for me. That shit does nothing but fill you with anger, hatred, and negative feelings. Even the so-called Christian ones made you feel the same way. That’s just the nature of the beast. I can see that now. Mama is ALWAYS right. She was always telling me to stop listening to metal music because it was bad for me, and I laughed at her and told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. But let me say, once again, that mama is always right.
Well anyway, this post is already way longer than I wanted it to be, so I’ll wrap up and get back to my point. Depression was a constant all through high school. It would ebb and flow but it always came back and hit me harder and harder each time. There was a period of time in sophomore year that I just wouldn’t sleep because I didn’t feel like it. In the week before a family vacation that summer, I maybe only slept 40 total hours. I was delirious those two weeks, but it was okay because I was so out of it that I forgot all about my pain.
This didn’t occur to me before writing this post, but this may have been the origin or precursor of the sleeping problems I have now. Back then, I also developed this habit of skipping meals, particularly when I felt overly sorry for myself. This still happens sometimes, nowadays. I guess you could call it a slight eating disorder. Bad habits are hard to break.
The worst was always around the time of my birthday, and I still haven’t quite figured out the root of it. It might be because in my mind I feel like I’m another year older, but not any more accomplished. The first time the birthday sadness occurred was the first year that I worked at a summer camp, 2009. There was another girl there with the same birthday as me. And not a single person wished me a happy birthday. Even my sister had forgotten, and that hurt more than anything. It was the day of the staff banquet, and I spent the night crying in my bunk. That was the first year.
And it’s come back without fail ever since. Sometimes it’s a few weeks before August 7th, sometimes a few weeks after. This year it hit late, and I’m in the midst of it now. But I’ll work through it. Lord knows I will. Sometimes you just have to wait it out. What goes up, must come down, and vice versa. That’s how emotions work. You can’t stay even-keeled forever. Sometimes you get hit, sometimes you get blessed. Today, being World Mental Health Day (well yesterday technically), marks a day that means a lot to me. Although, to be fair I didn’t know today was the day until about 9:30…
Mental health is not talked about and is seen as taboo. But it shouldn’t be. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone has their own struggles and vices, and this just happens to be mine. Speaking of vices, it’s been a habit of mine for a long time to ignore my pain by getting high. It’s time for that to stop. I can’t let weed remain a crutch in my life. It’s a drug that I will smoke, but isn’t and shouldn’t be a means to my happiness. This is something I will acknowledge now and forever. I need to be able to find happiness on my own. It’ll happen someday. I just don’t know when. But I welcome it, cause it’s time for me to take control of my life. I have to live the life I desire. Big Sean once said, “you live the life you deserve.” How true is that? Only you can make the change that you want to see in your life. No one else is going to do it for you.
That’s why I’m going to put more effort into looking for a job/career that I enjoy, finding a girl that I want to be with, and pursuing the hobbies that I want to pursue.
JHUMWRITES—A Mental Health Blog 