PROLOGUE
‘If you want to be happy, you mustn’t fear the following truths but confront them head-on: one, that we are always unhappy, and that our sadness, suffering and fear have good reasons for existing. Two, that there is no real way to separate these feelings completely from ourselves’ – Une Parfaite Journée Parfaite by Martin Page
2. I’ve always thought that art is about moving hearts and minds. Art has given me faith: faith that today may not have been perfect but was still a pretty good day, or faith that even after a long day of being depressed, I can still burst into laughter over something very small. I’ve also realised that revealing my darkness is just as natural a thing to do as revealing my light.
ONE: SLIGHTLY DEPRESSED
Classic signs such as hearing voices, intrusive thoughts and self-harming aren’t the only signs of depression. Just as a light flu can make our whole body hurt, a light depression can make our minds ache all over.
1. You need to break out of this cycle of failure and depression. Challenge yourself to do something you had never thought possible for you.
2. Sometimes the best thing to do with people who would never listen to you in the first place is to avoid them altogether. To right every wrong you come across in the world would be an impossible endeavour for any one person. You’re just one person, and you’re putting too much of the weight of the world on yourself.
3. If we have a habit of judging people from a simplistic perspective, that perspective will eventually turn against ourselves. But it’s also all right to be angry once in a while. For example, think of a person you admire and imagine what they would do in such a situation. Wouldn’t they be angry as well?They’d find this situation intolerable, too, wouldn’t they? If the answer is yes, then allow yourself to be angry. I think you tend to focus too much on your ideals and pressure yourself by thinking, I have to be this kind of person! Even when those ideals are, in fact, taken from someone else and not from your own thoughts and experiences.
4. People are complicated. They may seem perfect on the outside, but they could be doing terrible things in the dark. You can put them on a pedestal and end up being disappointed by them. Instead of being disappointed, try thinking this way: They’re living and breathing human beings too. This will make you more generous towards yourself.
5. I’d like you not to give too much credit to what people say about you. The moment you set out to be more empathic is the moment it becomes a chore. That would result in your empathy decreasing, if anything. It’s good not to fake interest in things you’re not interested in.
6. If you shift your perspective from their past to your present, you can start perceiving your personal experiences in a more positive manner. From ‘How sad they didn’t realise this’ to ‘How lucky it is that I realise this.’ In the past, you didn’t know how to label your symptoms, but now you know. That’s a reason for relief, not for more suffering.
7. The only thing to do here is to keep trying different things, little by little, trying to understand how much change is comfortable for you and what it is you really want. Once you understand what you like and how to reduce your anxiety, you’ll feel satisfaction. You’ll be able to accept or reject what others say about you.
8. Extremes tend to connect. For example, people who appear arrogant tend to have low self-esteem. They keep trying to get others to look up to them. But if someone has high self-esteem, they don’t really care what other people think about them.
TWO: AM I A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR?
1. We often lie when our cognitive abilities become impaired for whatever reason. Like when we’re drunk, for instance. You know how our memory or judgement falters after a few drinks, right? We subconsciously start lying to fill in the blanks. How many times have you seen drunk people insist they’re not drunk? We also find ourselves announcing things that have nothing to do with the context. When we’re drunk, we loosen our hold on our own minds. We call this ‘disinhibition’. Alcohol and drugs bring about disinhibition, which is why so many compulsive behaviours surface when we’re under the influence, and we end up doing things we would normally stop ourselves from doing. So don’t get too hung up over it, at least not for more than a day. Just tell yourself, ‘I won’t drink so much next time,’ and let it go.
2. If you have unrealistically high standards, you will forever be creating reasons to see yourself as inadequate, as someone who needs endless improvement.
3. You’re attempting to silence your own complaints by thinking, At least I’m better off than them. And the world is full of so much suffering that it’s the easiest thing to find people who are having a harder time than you are. But once you do, you then insist on taking the extra step of berating yourself: How could I have been so blind to that person’s hardships until now? It’s nice that you think of other people’s feelings and pay attention to them. But I want you to take stock of yourself a bit. Of your own feelings. You should share them with your friends, or if you’re sharing them with colleagues, you can say something like, ‘I know I’m better off than you are in certain respects, but I’m having a hard time, too.’ If anything, it’ll make both you and the listener more comfortable with each other.
4. When you’re having a hard time, it’s natural to feel like you’re having the hardest time in the world. And it’s not selfish to feel that way. Just because certain conditions in your life are relatively better, it doesn’t mean you’re better off in general. Take jobs or schools. It’s great when you get into a good company or university, but once you settle in, the complaints begin. Do you think it would be possible to think, This place is perfect! from the beginning of any experience to the end? Other people might envy you, but that doesn’t mean you yourself will automatically be satisfied with your lot. Which is why you shouldn’t torture yourself with questions like, Why can’t I be happy with what I have?
5. You should keep your phone far away when you sleep. It doesn’t matter for work whether you look at messages at night or the next morning, right? Try to distance whatever you can distance. Set priorities on your own.
Try to enjoy the present.
‘When you’re having a hard time, it’s natural to feel like you’re having the hardest time in the world. And it’s not selfish to feel that way.’
THREE: I'M UNDER CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE
1. It’s as if you’re keeping yourself under CCTV surveillance–to evaluate your own behaviour after every interaction. Did I do well that time? What did we talk about?Forgetfulness can be liberating, you know. It must be exhausting doing what you do. I think you should start allowing yourself to forget and let go of things that have already happened.
2. You put a lot of stock in what other people think. It’s because your satisfaction with yourself is so low. But your life is your life, your body is your body–and you have responsibility over it. Right now, you don’t process the input that comes to you through a mechanism of rationality or mediation, you go straight to the extreme. Self-surveillance isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there is so much you can do with the input, such as rationalising or finding a different way to think about things – but you only do one thing with it. There can be so many reasons for something, but you’re so focused on the result of it that you don’t see the reasons. You keep focusing on, I’m sad, I want to cry, I’m angry, which only amplifies these emotions.
There’s no need to be too negative about envying others. It could be motivation for you to better yourself.
3. We despair and often gain new tools when we overcome that despair. And when you’re depressed, your perspective changes and the same situation is interpreted differently. Your mood is extremely important. It determines how you interpret the random events of life.
4. You might have mistaken taking the train with your destination, losing sight of the actual destination. The whole time you were caught up in societal prejudices and norms. What matters isn’t what people say but what you like and find joy in. I hope you focus less on how you look to other people and more on fulfilling your true desires.
5. Sometimes you need to do things you don’t want to do, for different reasons. Why don’t you write down the pros and cons of the club, you might find an answer there. It’s just a hobby after all. You mustn’t let your hobby become stressful. But I hope if you don’t do it isn’t out of fear.
6. Usually before a dream becomes reality, we tend to think we’ll wish for nothing else if only the dream is realised. Imagine how you’d feel if you always remembered that your dream has already been fulfilled. M Everything that comes after would be like a lovely bonus. When you feel envious of something, try to imagine how you would look to your twenty-year-old self. Wouldn’t she think something like, Wow, look at me! I graduated college and I’m working at a publishing house!
Don’t compare yourself to other people.
Compare yourself to your past self.
‘What matters isn’t what people say but what you like and find joy in. I hope you focus less on how you look to other people and more on fulfilling your true desires.’
7. I’ve worked hard to get here. And now I make a living doing what I enjoy. I’ve no anxieties about whether this is the right path for me. All I want is to get better at it. That’s enough for me–why did I torture myself by comparing myself to someone else? If twenty-year-old me met me today, she would cry with joy. And that’s enough for me.
FOUR: MY DESIRE TO BECOME SPECIAL ISN'T SPECIAL AT ALL
1. Don’t think about the future too much. Your anxiety can become a burden to others.
2. I don’t think it’s a problem that needs fixing. It’s all a matter of how you see yourself. When you meet an artist, you see what the artist has that you lack. Why not change that perspective? When you meet them, you might think instead, This person is an artist, how exhausting it must be for them to be so sensitive. Or I really can’t connect with this person. Different perspectives create different reactions. Right now, you’re imposing your own standards on things and torturing yourself unnecessarily.
3. You’ve got to stop falling into the binary trap of thinking you’re either all-ordinary or all-special. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are not the only ways we think in black and white.
4. If you make yourself anxious to gain attention, someone will give you attention. Then you get comfortable, and the other person will as well. But after that, you feel despair again. Despite your intentions, you start thinking, If I’m happy then this person will stop paying attention to me, which naturally leads to you trying to avoid becoming happy at all costs. This brief attention will alleviate some of your anxiety for now, but from a long-term perspective, it’s just junk food that will spoil your health.
5. It’s good that you did what you wanted to do. I don’t think the decision to be alone is something to be praised or not in and of itself. Because it’s a matter of personal choice. But if you still have the memory of being happy having made that choice, that’s good. That’s comforting. You need to keep finding your own ways to comfort yourself.
‘I must have someone who loves me. Someone must ask after me every day for me to be alone.’
6. When you said you felt so comfortable with me, it made me feel pathetic that I was feeling uncomfortable myself. I also wanted to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to speak and laugh, but my words just crumbled in my mouth. Even when I was with you, I was a shadow. A dark, dark thing, stuck to your side, imitating your every move. ‘This is so nice, this is so comfortable,’ you kept saying, and I envied you for it. I wanted to laugh, to be comfortable in my relationship with someone, to be the kind of person who can easily become close to a person they like.
FIVE: THAT GODDAMN SELF-ESTEEM
1. We don’t live in some caste system, no one has the right to select anyone for anything. It’s all give and take.
2. That anxiety could’ve made your friend more anxious. Because the other person can mirror you, subconsciously. It’s like a magnet. When you want to get closer, they move away, and when you want to move away, they move closer. In general, thinking in extremes blocks out the nuances of relationships. You might have thought she was being annoying and enjoyed her attention as well. Anyone and everyone can feel annoyed by and enjoy attention at the same time. Just think of it as your smallest way of guarding your self-esteem, that’s all there is to it.
3. Do you think every behaviour falls into a category of, ‘They did this because they hate me’ or ‘They did this because they like me’? The whole point of not liking your friend’s behaviour means you don’t like her behaviour, not your friend as a person. But right now, you keep interpreting every behaviour exhibited by your friend as rejection.
4. There is no absolute good when it comes to relationships. And it’s perfectly healthy to have disagreements with friends and lovers from time to time. I just hope you learn to differentiate the parts from the whole. Just because you like one thing about a person, you don’t need to like everything about them. And just because you don’t like one thing about a person, it doesn’t mean the person as a whole isn’t worth your time. I think you should get in the habit of thinking differently.
‘Emotions have something like passageways, and if you keep blocking your bad emotions, you end up blocking your good emotions as well.’
5. I want to shed all tedious emotions. I don’t want to pretend I’m special (although remembering that you’re special is important in its way), but I do want to be happy. I don’t want others’ emotions or behaviours dominating my mood, or negative thought processes imprisoning me in the land of extremes. I want to break down all these repetitive behaviours that keep me within the constraints of rules and moulds. I want to own my own life. To do everything I want to do, so I don’t live a life of regret.
6. What I need to practise from now on is to stop trapping myself in some formula of, ‘This is what I have to be doing,’ and to simply acknowledge the fact that I am an independent individual.
SIX: WHAT SHOULD I DO TO KNOW MYSELF BETTER?
1. It really does help in many ways to use your imagination. It decreases compulsions in your daily life and there’s an element of vicarious satisfaction to it.
2. Writing can be a profound way of communicating and understanding each other, but you do have to be careful. But as long it’s your decision, it’s all right.
3. In any case, wanting to give closure is generally a good idea. But more than anything else, I hope you take this as an opportunity to get out of your previous thinking–that "This is the kind of person I should go out with" thinking – and see different kinds of people. For example, some people lose their first love and think, I’ll never find another person like them, but after a while, a new person takes their place. Think of yourself as entering a sea change in life, and choose things you haven’t chosen before–try to enter situations, even ones you know will end in failure, just to experience failure.
How you feel about yourself is much more
important than what your friends think of you.
4. As you said before, there are so many good things in the world, but I always seek out the bad. For example, I was just dumped. I found myself thinking he didn’t like me, but then I read something that reminded me that love comes in different shapes, and I shouldn’t judge someone else’s love by my own standards, which makes me think: Right, they, too, must have many different thoughts of their own, there could be another explanation. Then I feel like I’m rationalising and stop myself.
5. Me: What should I do to know myself?
Psychiatrist: Many people think they’re the foremost authority on themselves, but you should be more sceptical. You’ve got to ask
yourself, ‘Do I really know myself well?’ Isn’t it really like touching an elephant’s leg in the dark and thinking it’s a tree trunk?
Me: What should I be aiming for?
Psychiatrist: To see all things three-dimensionally.
Me: You’re right, so right. I think when you look at as many sides of a person as possible, you stop disliking them. I’ve thought about how I should be more like that.
Psychiatrist: The fairy tales we read as children are very one-dimensional. There are good people and bad people in those stories. But in the books adults read, it becomes harder to divide up characters into absolutely good and absolutely bad people. I hope you learn to look at a person as a whole before judging them. And to look upon yourself as a whole individual as well.
Me: Does writing notes help?
Psychiatrist: It does. I think this is an experiment you can act on immediately in your daily life, which is another good attitude to have. When you say you’re going to get a tattoo today, write down your feelings before and after getting the tattoo. Once you do that, you’ll find a commonality there. ‘In some ways, I feel fear. In these other ways, I feel relief.’ That kind of thing. In this way, writing can be a way of
regarding yourself three-dimensionally.
‘What’s wrong with rationalising? It’s a perfectly reasonable defence mechanism. It’s you trying to find reasons behind your hurt or your decisions.’
7. Things will get better with time. Or no, everything is dynamic, which means life will have jump-for-joy moments as well as bad ones, going back and forth like the tide. If I’m sad today I’ll be happy tomorrow, and if I’m happy today I’ll be sad tomorrow –that’s fine. As long as I keep loving myself. I am someone who is completely unique in this world, someone I need to take care of for the rest of my life, and therefore someone I need to help take each step forward, warmly and patiently, to allow to rest on some days and to encourage on others – I believe that the more I look into this strange being, myself, the more routes I will find to happiness.
SEVEN: REGULATING, JUDGING, BEING DISSAPOINTED, LEAVING
1. Psychiatrist: Your biggest problem remains this black-and-white thinking. You’ve backed yourself into a corner and made yourself choose between black or white. Whether to see a person or not, whether to be best friends with them or never speak to them again. You either lash out or endure. The only choices you have are yes and no, and there is no middle ground. I think with this friend, you thought you had a ‘special friendship’, which was why you tried to endure and continue. And you got exhausted at keeping up this ruse.
Me: You’re right. At first I thought she and I had a lot in common but we’re actually quite different, which was why we kept arguing. When she said something I didn’t agree with, I felt like she was attacking me, and that hurt me. So that I wouldn’t be hurt by her, I would either fit myself into her way of being or not make time for her. I could’ve opened up to her more, or maintained a slightly disappointing situation.
Psychiatrist: There are many shades of grey, but I think even there you think there is only one shade of grey. A spectrum contains many colours and shades, but you don’t see it that way.
Me: I’m so embarrassed. I keep telling myself that people are three-
dimensional, but I keep thinking of them as flat–which is why when I look at some people, I judge them as being such-and-such, and then cut them out of my life.
2. Psychiatrist: This problem doesn’t stop with others. Your very real problem is that you bring this same judgmental attitude on yourself. Like when you berate yourself after a drunken night.
Me: I keep thinking that if I reveal a vulnerable part of myself, people will see that and hate it and leave me. But I know so many aspects of the lives of the people I love. Their bad parts, their good parts, their sensitive parts . . . Even if they have negative parts, I like that they have them because it makes them human. But when it comes to myself, I think the tiniest flaw will make people leave me.
Psychiatrist: It’s your self-esteem. If you had high self-esteem and were sure of your tastes, you wouldn’t care if people criticised you or mocked you.
3. Me: Can you believe how little confidence I have in my taste to worry about things like that? As if such judgement against me mattered at all. I definitely have low self-esteem, and that’s why I’m oversensitive to what my friend thinks. And because I’m not grounded in confidence, I keep thinking every word spoken to me is an attack, and I see things as right or wrong despite the many other different ways of seeing them.
Psychiatrist: Did anything else happen?
Me: I realised something about myself. I equate affection with influence. Because my roots are so weak and shallow, I only feel safe when I exert influence on others. Which is why when someone is sensitive towards my feelings, I believe they really love me and our relationship is strong. But a strong relationship and an entangled one are different things, and while my head understands that a good relationship is two people with a clear sense of individuality working together as a team, my heart feels that if the other person seems very independent of me–as in, they don’t seem to be deeply affected or touched by my every word, don’t try to adhere strictly to my standards of behaviour, don’t change according to my directives or follow my examples–there’s something wrong with me. (I’m such a weirdo!)
Psychiatrist: It’s this behaviour that feeds into your desire to be validated. The more you want to be influenced, the more you will try to influence others, and the less someone reacts to your efforts, the more you make an effort. And then you become exhausted. This is just another extreme effort, another way of creating limits for yourself. The idea that a person loves you only when they’re influenced by you–that in itself is an extreme attitude.
4. Me: Then what can I do about it?
Psychiatrist: Focus on yourself more. Specifically, write down what you really enjoy, and also write about the differences in how you see yourself and how others see you. It would also be a good idea to take stock of things that you would do under the imagined gaze of others.
Me: But I always do what I want to do.
Psychiatrist: Do you really behave the same with everyone?
Me: No. I think I did change my behaviour for that friend a little bit. I don’t know why I did that. I kept seeing myself behave in a way that just wasn’t me, and when I tried not to act that way, I felt like I was being rude.
Psychiatrist: What if that rudeness is a way of expressing yourself? Take control and responsibility for your actions instead of caring so much about what other people think. Right now, your relationship is narrow, like a triangle, and pierces your heart, but at least a dodecahedron is closer to a circle than an octagon, right? The deeper and more varied relationships you have, the rounder your mind will be, and the less the
angles will pierce you. You will be just fine.
‘To tell the truth, no one was looking down on me except myself’.
5. That human beings are three-dimensional is perhaps my favourite thing to say. But it is also likely the last thing I will remember in a bad moment. Everyone has multiple sides to them, happiness and unhappiness coexist, and everything is relative. To tell the truth, no one was looking down on me except myself. When I looked again at my friend’s messages from that day, it struck me that her comment was just something I could’ve ignored. But because I had assumed she was looking down on me, the message had taken on a bigger meaning. Which is why I provoked her with a harsh reply. I wanted to get a strong m reaction from her. I did it to end the relationship.
6. I hope that people who keep ending their relationships because they feel like they’re being looked down on, people who tend to think in extremes like me, will read this. We are many-sided. That’s all. We can’t continue a relationship or end it because of just one thing. I understand this with my head, but my heart has more trouble recognising it. The unhappiness floats to the top like oil while the happiness sinks below. But the container that holds both is what we call life, and that’s where I find solace and joy. I’m sad, but I’m alive, and living through it. That is my solace and my joy.
EIGHT: MEDICATION SIDE EFFECTS
1. My medication had given me akathisia. Akathisia refers to the inability to sit still. You find yourself standing or fidgeting or pacing–it’s an occasional side effect in people who take tranquillisers.
2. Me: All right. I feel like I talk about the same problem every time. And you always give me the same answers. I don’t change myself, which is why the same problems keep coming up.
Psychiatrist: What you just said is very important. These are all behaviours you had no awareness of until recently, and to realise that you make the same choices time and time again is, in itself, proof you’re getting better.
3. Me: It’s all from having no middle ground and thinking in black and white. Which is why I wanted to make a middle-ground choice. I didn’t want to end my relationship with my friend in such a destructive way, so I told her everything. That I had thought she was looking down on me, and that I’m so used to being extreme that I thought the only thing to do in the situation was to either understand her or end the friendship. Once I told her that, I felt much better inside, and my friend was understanding.
Psychiatrist: Good. This may be a kind of relationship that you have never had before. This kind of behaviour is how you increase your freedom and share your responsibilities with others. You should be very proud that you approached her and expressed yourself in words to her. And I think that incident with her and some of these recent feelings can safely be put down to side effects of the medication.
4. I always considered pain or discomfort as me being a nuisance. I would censor my own pain. Despite my discomfort, I cared more about how I appeared to others. I hated to look as if I was whining about something that was actually more or less bearable. I was ashamed of my pain. Which was why it took so long for me to acknowledge the side effects of the medicine.
5. I always consider myself as unhappy, and know that’s a form of self-pity, but today I want to console myself. I am always the target of my own criticism – not saying I hurt even when I do, admitting something is wrong only when my mind and body scream at me in different ways, and making the fact that I hurt in the first place my own fault. Even when I throw myself at others, I deliberately do it to get stabbed in the heart. Which means, the more I hurt others, the bigger my own wounds become. But I am trying to create a middle ground in my world, and I’m realising some of the ways side effects manifest in my behaviour, so I would call this past week a pretty meaningful one.
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