A Life
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
These things have been tormenting me lately. I'll write them down and publish them, however messy they are.
Lately
Finals are coming. Everything the anxiety brings with it makes me think of these things again: sleepless nights, the occasional breakdown.
Ever since Grandma became ill, my mental state hasn't been quite right. I can't put into words what each day feels like. I live mechanically, tied in knots. Interacting with people is exhausting. Lately, I don't even feel like gathering my thoughts into an article anymore.
Doing anything that takes time feels like running a long-distance race, utterly spent but still forcing myself through the final stretch. I coax myself along: only a few hundred meters left, endure it a little longer and it'll be over. But the pain and the urge to give up keep growing. So tired, so much pain, so hopeless.
Repetition
I've always felt that I'm… a very ordinary person. Even if my grades aren't bad, even if my abilities aren't bad, I don't dare acknowledge anything good about myself. When I was little and thought I was doing well, everyone told me to climb higher, come first, get into a good university. But I didn't. I'm not that clever. I just kept working my way upward, exhausted and passive, and when I found I couldn't reach the very top, something inside me would always break a little.
I'm still studying hard at university, but I can't match those people's rankings in my major either.
So I doubt and deny myself. I don't dare tell myself I'm good. I just keep going, revising, trying for good grades, watching the rankings… And when I'm not doing that, when something has nothing to do with studying or assessment, I become anxious and worried about everything.
It hurts. Especially when I discover that the time I've put in hasn't produced the results I expected. I dismiss myself all over again: more time wasted, more ground lost in the competition. It hurts.
Ever since Grandma died, I've wanted to be assessed for depression. At the top-tier hospital near my university. There's that saying, “Xiehe in the north, Xiangya in the south.” The one near me is Xiangya; their diagnosis should be accurate.
But… I don't know what diagnosing and treating a mental illness would be for. I'm tired, I can't get going, I don't want to, I feel awful—but I've never imagined what “getting better” would look like. I'm detached by nature. Normal people are like this too, aren't they? Could medication make me more alert than coffee does? Would it make me happy every day for no reason? I only want a diagnosis as an excuse for yet another time I stubbornly lie in bed, unable to move. A reason to let myself slowly become useless, refuse treatment, and use that reason to deal with myself with a clear conscience.
I no longer know what being alive is for. At first, it was: I want to earn money so I can buy whatever I want. But now I think, what if I manage it? I can only live without anything solid to hold on to, switch off my brain and do things by day, lie in bed enduring myself at night, then get up the next morning to face the sunlight numbly again. I don't want to hear people say I'm the same as everyone else. I hate being the same as other people. I'm already getting confused. My thinking has always jumped around.
I miss Grandma. I keep thinking: why did she die by suicide, why didn't she keep getting treatment, why didn't she want me anymore? What's even more ridiculous is that I cry every time I think of her, and I can't tell anyone, so everyone thinks I'm a calm child who has accepted that she's gone. I'm the least calm of all. I grew up with her. How could I be calm? How could I not cry? No, I can't think of her anymore. Once I do, I can't stop crying.
It hurts so much. I feel like someone discarded in a corner of the world. I can't even cry out loud in my dorm or under the covers. Only the numbness and busyness of the day keep me numb and stable. My brain keeps circling: do I want to live? What would living mean? Do I want to die, then? What would dying mean? I just exist. I can't find any meaning. Sleep today, wake up tomorrow, sleep again, wake again. The day of the week doesn't matter. Neither does the date. Time corresponds to tasks. Once a task ends, I crash.
Turmoil
I used to look down on people with depression. When I saw the damage they'd done to their arms, all I wondered was whether they'd injured their motor nerves. Whenever I think that harming myself would make me one of them, I stop myself from acting on it. But when I'm going to sleep, even if I'm thinking of nothing and simply lying down, my brain automatically imagines self-harm, starts thinking about suicide, automatically pictures blood flowing from my arm. I haven't consciously thought any of it. I feel as if my brain and my mind are separate. This mind that's talking to you is merely housed in this body. And I don't like this body either.
Sometimes I imagine sensations, the feeling of a cold blade… though not often. More often, now that summer is here, I lie down and feel as if I've been bitten by a mosquito somewhere: a sharp little itch. The spot is random. I can't tell whether I'm imagining it or something really is biting me. Sometimes, when I'm in a better state, I can shower, tidy my desk, sweep, mop, scrub the toilet. I have the energy to do it properly. But when I'm exhausted, all I want is to lie down. Even showering feels like a huge expenditure of energy, as if I'll faint in the bathroom. When I have energy, I feel quite normal. So I've kept leaving all this alone.
Grandma
I need to keep my old promise and write about Grandma. She was the only presence that mattered in my past 18 years. Now that presence has collapsed, and all I can do is hold a remembrance of my own. These scraps are pieced together. I don't have the energy to organize them, so let them sit here in their disorder, as a record.
One
Grandma had nasopharyngeal cancer before I was born. She was in her thirties or forties; I can't remember. She went through treatment after treatment. Radiation and chemotherapy left the skin on her neck covered in ugly lumps. She also had a tracheotomy. To speak, she had to press the opening in her neck. Later, Dad and his first love broke up at university, leaving behind me, a child born before they married. Grandma said she'd raise me. It was her idea that I wasn't aborted: my birth mother had already had two abortions, and Grandma, worried about her health, wouldn't let her have another. That's how I came into the world. The thought had been that once the baby was born, Dad and his “first love” could stay together. But my birth mother's parents thought Dad was a poor boy who wasn't good enough for her. They demanded a bride price so high that Grandma couldn't have afforded it even if she'd sold her home. So the marriage never happened. My birth mother didn't want to raise me. She left a month or two after I was born and never came back to see me. Grandma was there to catch me, and she raised me, from the beginning all the way through.
Grandma had a temper. I also always felt she was less normal than other people. Her liquid food frightened me. At first it was bread soaked in milk—yes, a mush whose smell alone made me want to vomit. She also had to clean her metal tracheotomy tube, full of phlegm, and I didn't dare touch that either. But bit by bit, she kept raising me. Whatever food I wanted, she'd buy. Whatever I needed for school, she'd buy too. But when she was angry or sad, she'd tell me I was the only thing she had to hold on to, that raising me was her only reason to live. If I wouldn't behave, she might as well jump off a building or be hit by a car.
I'll stop there for now. Chapter one.
Two
Well… everyday life. After I started middle school, Grandma felt a bit better, because she'd originally only expected to raise me that far. I refused to board at school. I wanted to come home and be with her every day. She didn't refuse me; she let me have my way. During middle school, her health worsened. After so long on liquid food, her muscles had atrophied and her esophagus had closed completely. She couldn't eat through her mouth anymore. To stay alive and keep raising me, she went to the hospital for a gastrostomy. She blended food into a paste and used a syringe to put it directly into her stomach through the opening. And she kept raising me. I did pretty well in middle school and got into a leading local high school, into one of its advanced classes, even. Grandma was happy and wanted me to go. In high school, I kept working and was placed in the top class. That made her even happier. But her health seemed to keep declining. She used to go out to the card room to play, but after I started high school, she spent more and more time at home or in bed. I just thought she was getting old. And she was, I suppose. Sixty.
That's chapter two.
Three
Chapter three. The gaokao, China's university entrance exam. Yes, it's almost that time again now. I took it last year. My result… although I felt I was a few points short of the university and major I wanted, I was the first child in the family to get into a 985 university, one of China's designated elite universities. I was already a child with very good grades. Grandma was happy too. Looking at my admission letter, she told me I'd be living at university now and would need to learn to look after myself. I told her not to worry. Thankfully, my roommates weren't as frightening as the ones in films and TV shows. They were all easy to get along with. I was lucky. But in my first semester, I was still a little afraid of living away from home, so I called Grandma whether I had anything to say or not. One call a day. She always told me not to call if nothing was wrong. I refused. I wanted to call. I missed her.
The first time I went home that semester, I found that her hair had turned white. I asked why so much of it was white now. She said she didn't have the energy to use hair dye anymore, so she'd stopped. She said her ear hurt. From just before the gaokao until I was at university, I kept telling her to get it checked at the hospital soon. She kept enduring it. I don't know what she was holding out for. Each day on the phone, she'd just say, “Grandma's ear hurts. I won't talk anymore,” and end the call. Then one day, before my first winter break, I called and realized that even her voice had changed. I asked outright whether she'd failed to look after herself and caught a cold. She didn't say much. I bought the earliest ticket home for the winter break. When I saw her waiting for me at the high-speed rail station, her hair completely white and her body a little shorter, it hurt. Then I contacted Dad and my aunt and said we needed to take her to the hospital over the break, to find out why her ear hurt.
Four
Chapter four. First, I took Grandma to my aunt's home in Hengyang. My aunt works at a top-tier hospital and knows how things work there. We spent a day taking Grandma through examinations. The doctor noticed something wrong with her blood count and ordered a CT scan. A day later, the CT suggested a tumor in her throat. Malignant or benign? We didn't know. More tests, a biopsy. She already had a history of nasopharyngeal cancer; another tumor in that area was going to be difficult. I wanted her to go to Changsha, to a bigger hospital, to Xiangya for a diagnosis. So I asked Dad to take her. As it happened, he'd just been laid off and had time to take her to the hospital in Changsha. Another series of tests.
Grandma told me that if it was cancer, she wouldn't have it treated. I told her it wouldn't be. It wasn't cancer, just a cold, and she hadn't been taking care of herself for a long time. They'd prescribe something and her ear would feel better. The results came back from Changsha. It was cancer. In her throat: “well-developed squamous cell carcinoma.” Perhaps it was pressing on a nerve; maybe that was why her ear hurt. But my semester was about to start, and all I could do was go back to university. I was studying in Changsha too, as it happened. Once her diagnosis was confirmed there, I returned to campus. She went to Hengyang for treatment, where my aunt could look after her. I could only wait at university for news.
Five
Chapter five. It isn't over yet. Let me talk about what changed for me at university. I started my own blog, but apart from study notes, everything I wrote was about worries and anxieties over home. I reflected on my family, my final year of high school, my grandma, and my fears for her at Qingming. When she was diagnosed, the doctor said it was early-to-intermediate-stage cancer and surgery could be very effective. But with all the muscles in her neck fibrotic, surgery was impossible. Targeted therapy was the only option. Meanwhile, she lost the ability to speak completely. She couldn't make a sound. All I could do was teach her to make video calls. Gradually, I almost forgot what her voice sounded like. Thankfully, the previous semester I'd set calls with my grandparents to record automatically. That little stroke of foresight preserved her voice. But I haven't listened again.
Dad said there were targeted drugs now. And targeted drugs, well, they burn through money. He was unemployed, so the credit card and savings were being drained. No one told Grandma how much it cost. She asked me once, and I said I didn't know either. She might have thought it was tens of thousands a month. She was already carrying so much worry, already unable to sleep. Still, she followed the doctor's treatment. Maybe she still wanted to see me grow up, still thought I couldn't take care of myself. The side effects were severe. Soon her neck was suppurating and leaking thick fluid. Dressings and medication had to be changed constantly. Meanwhile, I was trying hard to learn things. I learned to manage money. I even earned a small prize in a competition. I was happy; I thought it might reassure her. Before the May Day holiday, I said I was coming back to see her, that I missed her. I kept the prize money a secret so I could tell her happily in person. I thought everything would slowly get better. Just as she'd had the gastrostomy when I was in middle school and had been able to keep living.
The End
Well. The final chapter. I went back to my aunt's home for the May Day holiday. Grandma had temporarily left hospital and was staying there. My aunt lives on the eleventh floor. In the car, she told me Grandma hadn't been doing well lately. The treatment was making her hair fall out by the handful; soon it would all be gone. My heart sank. But then she said I'd finally managed to come back, so I should have something good to eat. She'd prepared crayfish for me to have when we got home. I said okay. My aunt's daughter, my cousin Niuniu, was about to sit her high-school entrance exams and was under a lot of pressure. My aunt was anxious about whether she'd get into a leading high school too, and they'd argued over something small that day. When I got back, Niuniu was still locked in her room and wouldn't come out. Grandma asked me to get her to come eat crayfish with us. But my aunt was angry and said to let her cool down first. The locked door made her angry too. Grandma could only shake her head.
The first person I ran to when I got home was Grandma. She was asleep on the sofa. I told her I was home. She woke up, touched me, nuzzled against me. I squeezed her foot, and she curled her toes around my hand, just as we'd always done. After dinner, she suddenly beckoned me over and handed me a bundle of red banknotes. I was shocked. I told her straight away: Grandma, I can earn my own money now, and I haven't been wasting it. I won 500 in a competition. I still have enough living money this month. I don't need that much spending money—it's 4,000 yuan! She just told me to take it, pushing it into my hand. So I accepted it, put it away, put it in my bag. She nodded, satisfied, and said nothing. I only thought she didn't want me to go without while I was away, didn't want me to feel bad because I couldn't buy something I wanted to eat. She couldn't respond to my needs now. I understood. All I could do was save it carefully and try not to spend carelessly. I'd developed a habit of saving.
I stayed with her. She felt cold, so I tucked a quilt around her. I even told her off: if she got cold so easily, why was she wearing so little, why wasn't she looking after herself? She only smiled. I stayed beside her until eleven at night, when she gestured that it was late and I should go to bed. Niuniu had calmed down too. I was going to lie down in her room; Grandma slept in the big bed on the balcony. I said okay, should I turn the lights off? It was late. Grandpa was sleepy too, asleep on the sofa. Grandma nodded. I put away my computer. I was used to staying up late and couldn't sleep at eleven, so I went into Niuniu's room, climbed into bed, and pulled the covers over me. It did feel a little cold that day. I kept looking at my phone. I was getting a bit sleepy.
Then, in the middle of the night, a huge cry from Grandpa startled me awake. It woke everyone. I didn't get up immediately. My aunt jumped up and went to the living room to ask what had happened. I thought he'd accidentally hurt himself. I didn't listen closely. I climbed slowly out of bed and went to the living room. Suddenly, I noticed that Niuniu, who'd run out first, was crying and crying, crying in fear. I asked what was wrong. Then I noticed that Grandma was gone. Where had she gone? Why was the living room so cold? Why was the window open? I froze.
I can keep telling what happened next. Though I'm shaking a little now, just as I did that night. My aunt ran out of the flat, and so did Grandpa. Suddenly, only Niuniu and I were left. I looked at that large balcony window, with no security bars. Then I messaged my roommate. “My grandma died by suicide.” He video-called me. I didn't answer. I was looking, thinking: how had Grandma, with no strength left, moved the bed and coffee table together into a perfect step, opened that huge window, and jumped? I went closer to the window. Eleventh floor. Night. A little cold. I didn't dare look down, but I felt I had to record something, so I shakily raised my phone and took a photo below. I looked at the photo. Such a small mark. Eleven floors was so high that it made her look so small. She lay down there, wrapped in the quilt I'd put around her, because she was cold too. I was cold too. No one was around her.
Dad came quickly. It happened at midnight; by three in the morning, he was at my aunt's. The death certificate came quickly too. Everyone sat in the living room discussing things. I looked at the certificate on the coffee table, again and again. The stated cause was “suicide due to illness.” My aunt said we couldn't tell the relatives it was suicide. We had to say she'd suffered a sudden massive hemorrhage and couldn't be saved. Mum held me. I think I was crying the whole time. My runny nose got her hair dirty, but she kept holding me. I was still shaking. Dad and my aunt told me to sleep, so I went. I lay down and covered myself with a quilt. Shaking. So cold. Even under the quilt, so cold. I stayed awake until six in the morning, finally gave in to sleep, and woke at ten. Mum, Dad, and my aunt had been up all night too. They'd gone to the funeral home and completed all the arrangements. Grandma was cremated. I didn't go to see her one last time. I didn't dare. Then we were to go back to our ancestral hometown in the countryside for the funeral and a heap of mystical rituals. Mum pointed to the urn and said that Grandma, who'd been 1.6 meters tall, had become this little box. I just took another photo. I didn't cry.
When all the rituals were over, I drifted back into being a normal person. Studying, living. My aunt told me not to think too much, to come to her or Mum and Dad if I had trouble. To think of Grandma as still in Leiyang, still in the place where I'd grown up. Perhaps still waiting for me to come home.
The Cycle
I'm in so much pain. But what is pain? I can't explain anything anymore. My brain tells me I'm hoping I'll break soon, or become useless, or something—watch myself bleed and hurt, at least feel a little of “oh, so I am a living thing.” Then another side tells me I'm not qualified to express pain yet. I haven't experienced life's worst torment. I shouldn't be going to hell. I'm caught in between, sleepless in a haze, hurting in a haze, then crying. After the tears, I look at everything wide awake again. The next day, I'm paralyzed in bed until some point in the afternoon, waiting for a moment that may never come to wake me, then beginning another cycle of anxiety.
Chaos. Right up to now.
I'm still lucid. While I can, while I'm still lucid. What should I do?
Gathering the scattered pieces, I threw the words out into the world.
Tomorrow will be another cycle.