The curse of the original family

The symptoms described in this article are what I have been struggling with for a long time since I returned to my home in Shanghai from Guangzhou. But after arriving in New York last week, depression was replaced by stress response. As I force myself to get familiar with this new city little by little every day, although I have not yet reconciled with loneliness, I feel that my mental state is slowly getting better. Looking back at the diary at that time, I just feel extremely strange and ashamed.

I called myself a "crying log" in my journal, and wrote countless times, "I just want to lie in bed with my eyes open and stare blankly," "I feel anxious about not accomplishing anything, and then I can't help crying," "My body seems to have stopped functioning, and I have a hard time completing even the basic activities of daily life," and "I can't concentrate on anything." A few months ago, I called myself a "nymphomaniac," but I found myself impotent, which also troubled me. In short, I was slowly falling for a whole month; in that state, it didn't make any difference whether I was alive or dead .

I knew that if this situation continued, I would probably be doomed. But I was too embarrassed to tell my friends about my situation and hoped to seek professional help. I mustered up the courage to try using free resources (NYU's Wellness Exchange app), but after several attempts, I found that only the customer service responded and the consultant was always offline, so I gave up.

Self-help was fruitless, so I pinned my hopes on attributing the symptoms. The best way to solve a problem is to stop treating it as a problem. I understand this, but I couldn't stay rational at that time and stop focusing on my own bad state . I accidentally saw the best posts of the "Philosophical Treatment of Depression" group on Douban, which recommended a lot of introductory psychology books. I marked "Undoing Depression" and "Flow" as "want to read". Then I looked up the definition of bipolar disorder and found that it was always confused with BPD (borderline personality disorder), and it was difficult for me to say which one I was. In fact, the most taboo thing is to put yourself into a certain preset description, which will only make something out of nothing and exaggerate the situation, but at the same time, I can't help but put myself in the same situation. It seems that by labeling myself as a mental illness, I can make sense of everything and avoid responsibility for myself .

The night before I left, I was chatting with a friend and accidentally mentioned the quagmire I was in. I knew she had also been troubled by anxiety and might understand me, but she said that I was too idle during the holidays and stayed at home most of the time. She said that my original family was the root cause of my holiday depression .

Since it's not my fault, I'm not hopeless. Looking back at every holiday in the past, unless I was not at home during the day, going out to socialize or studying in a cafe or library, I would fall into an indescribable depression at home. It can be said that escaping from my original family was a goal I set in junior high school, but I gradually forgot about it after entering college.

When I observe my family from an objective perspective, I find that the whole atmosphere is indeed very toxic . Because the elderly in the family fell ill one after another, my parents resigned about ten years ago. Because my mother was neither high nor low, it was difficult for her to stay in the job she found for more than three months at first. As she got older, it is now difficult for her to find a suitable job. My father used to help out in a relative's company, but after being bullied and owed wages, he simply resigned to take care of the family, cooking, taking my grandmother to see a doctor, and picking me up from school. In the years before the epidemic, they could barely increase their income by doing micro-business. 20 years later, the previous factory closed, and the small business basically could not continue. My parents have long been out of touch with society because they have not worked for many years, but they are the absolute authority in this family .

Therefore, whenever I am at home, I have to face the following situation: my father sleeps until noon and gets up to cook, puts on headphones to watch the computer for three hours in the afternoon, continues to cook dinner, takes a walk after dinner, and during all the time he is awake, he complains of dizziness and headache, and he can’t stand or sit steadily, and his whole body hurts (he has had a full physical examination and nothing is wrong, I think it is a somatic manifestation of mental problems); my mother, who became a vice president in her early thirties, has become a housewife, and only part of her pride can be transformed into resentment, which she uses to find fault with my grandmother and complain about the work at hand, and the other part is placed on faith, often folding paper money (Shanghainese is called "folding tin foil") or burning incense in the temple; my grandmother is over eighty years old, and her cerebellum has atrophied many years ago. She doesn't like to go out and socialize with other old ladies, but just sits on the balcony or watches TV all day. She is like a surveillance camera, and calls her parents to urge them to go home when they go out for more than half an hour. Everyone is weird enough, and the chemical reaction that occurs when they stay under the same roof for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is even more intense.

It may be an unbearable chronicle for readers to spend such a long time writing about my family situation, but I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. In fact, my feelings towards my original family have always been very complicated. On the one hand, I resent my parents' incompetence; on the other hand, I feel guilty for thinking this way .

It takes a lot of courage to admit that your parents are trash . After all, they were the authority in your heart when you were a child. This is equivalent to knocking down the gods you created with your own hands. This is a long process. I even need to rely on my boyfriend as a third party to help me confirm my intuition without burden. When I was in middle school, I always resented why they couldn’t be like other people’s parents, go to work "normally" on weekdays, and take me on a "normal" family trip during holidays (this has been a long-term pain in my heart. After all, I studied in a private junior high school. Going abroad in summer vacation and traveling domestically in winter vacation are routine operations among classmates. I, who was not yet mature, always felt inferior in front of my classmates because of this)? After college, I couldn’t stand their control. Why couldn’t they connect with the outside world and accept the reality that wearing suspenders is not pornographic?

But things are often not that simple, and I always can't help but fall into self-doubt and defend them . Sometimes I accept my parents' argument that the reason they haven't worked for many years is the noble and forced reason of "taking care of the family." Sometimes I wonder if I have no right to make comments without giving anything, and can only express gratitude? After all, they have been supporting me to go to school, picking me up and dropping me off as usual in wind and rain, and even spent all their savings to support me to come to the United States for an exchange year.

But then I thought, is their effort really necessary? Is it a waste of time to spend all their energy every day studying how to buy daily necessities and preparing three dishes and one soup for dinner? If they go to work normally, the elderly will have to wait to die in the hospital, and I will not be able to go to school? I dare not think about it anymore.

The tension between the two emotions made me constantly consume myself, and I swung back and forth between the two extremes. Simply going to either extreme would make me feel much better, either activating the self-protection mechanism to glorify my parents, or facing the reality and running away. But I can't do it. When the balance of my thoughts leans to one end, the other end will send a warning to remind me to wake up. In the long run, I pua myself, which is probably the root cause of my depression.

Writing all this down, I am struck by how similar my parents and this country are!

The underlying logic of family and country is isomorphic. Their similarity is that as long as they are giving and working very hard, they are just, and the recipients of their giving must express gratitude, otherwise they are ungrateful.

My mother often spends a whole week folding paper money before special days. Even if she can buy paper to burn, she will still spend the whole afternoon doing it, so she is undoubtedly a very filial daughter.

The state is allocating funds to promote the mandatory implementation of normalized nucleic acid testing. Grassroots workers have to wear white masks and work for several hours in the hot summer, so we as citizens must obey.

This kind of praise for hardship and the praise of suffering can easily cultivate obedient lambs, and unknowingly we are strangled to speak our mind. Once we start to try to reflect, we will find that everything is so fragmented.

But it is much easier to reflect on the country than on my parents. After all, in my mind, the country is an abstract entity. I can easily say that I want to exercise my right to criticize as a citizen and taxpayer; but my parents are real people who I see every day. It is difficult for me to criticize them. Even if I say a few words, they can defeat me with the universal logic of "I am your father".

This is an unsolvable problem, which I call the "curse of the original family."

Only by running away can you escape the cycle of internal friction.