Micro-fiction: \"Wang Dashu’s Personal Growth Journey\"

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\"Wang Dashu’s Personal Growth Experience\" When I was seeking treatment at the psychology department of a hospital in Beijing, the doctor asked me to write about my personal growth experience. The content is as follows: Dear doctor, My name is Wang Dashu. I have listed, in five stages – elementary school, junior high school, senior high school, university, and after starting work – all the things that caused me pain, sadness, and distress, as well as the things that made me feel afraid, nervous, or anxious. I’ve also written down those emotional matters that were too difficult for me to talk about, so that you can analyze my psychological state. Primary school stage: The focus is on studying*, and there are hardly any other extracurricular activities aside from studying*. Since my family lives in the rural area of Shunyi, Beijing, and our home is about 1 kilometer away from the school, I have to get up around 5 o’clock every morning. After having breakfast, I walk to school in the early hours of the day so as to arrive there before 7:30. She loved mathematics in elementary school; starting from the third grade, she joined a math club and won third prize in elementary school math competitions. In the fifth and sixth grades, she attended only math tutoring sessions and skipped all other classes, with the goal of taking the “Double Foundation Exam” for admission to elite middle schools. In the end, I was successfully admitted to Yangzhen No.1 Middle School, a key junior high school in Shunyi District. In elementary school, I had one or two good playmates, who were all classmates from the same village. During junior high school: Due to my good academic performance, I was placed in the top classes of the school. However, I felt inferior because my family was very poor; it was difficult for us to afford tuition fees, and we had to be very frugal with our food expenses – we ate meat only once a week, while mostly eating vegetables. Since both of my parents are farmers, I didn’t dare to let them come to school to see me, nor did I dare to have them attend parent-teacher meetings, for fear that my classmates would laugh at me because my parents were farmers. She is introverted; she has only one or two close friends, and her relationships with the other students are rather casual. She gets along best with a classmate from the city, and often sneaks out of school to buy **magazines**. I was weak and often sick; I was the thinnest person in my class. I suffered from malnutrition for a long time, had a dark complexion, and because of my thin build, I felt very insecure about myself. I have never fought with any of my classmates – I simply don’t know how to fight. In the eighth grade, I was bullied by classmates in another dormitory; I didn’t dare to fight back and could only go to the teacher to complain, but that didn’t solve the problem either. Starting from the eighth grade, I suffered from severe stomach problems; the hospital diagnosed it as chronic superficial gastritis. I visited countless hospitals and saw numerous doctors, but none of them were able to provide any effective treatment. In the end, I had no choice but to go to the pharmacy and buy medicine on my own; I no longer trusted the drugs prescribed by doctors, as they simply didn’t work at all. Out of fear of missing classes, I never received systematic treatment for chronic gastritis; instead, I would go to the pharmacy on my own to buy stomach medications. I have tried various well-known stomach drugs, both traditional Chinese and Western ones, and I took them regularly – from the second year of middle school all the way until I graduated from high school, with almost no breaks in taking these medications. It was almost impossible to attend physical education classes in junior high; I had to skip class for long periods of time, as stomach pain would set in whenever I had physical education class, making it impossible for me to exercise. Fortunately, thanks to my strong willpower, I managed to score full marks in the physical education exam in the ninth grade. I have to endure stomach pain both during classes and at night while sleeping, and my mood remains depressed for long periods of time. Due to my frequent illnesses, I had to go to the school clinic once a week, and the doctors there were very familiar with me. During junior high school, I got along well with another patient who shared the same dormitory; perhaps it was because we had the same illness. That student had to take medication regularly due to a concussion, and we thus shared that common condition. I don’t like playing soccer or basketball, and I have hardly any extracurricular sports activities; I feel out of place among my classmates. I was proud of having won third place in a math competition during my elementary school years. When I participated in the math competition in junior high, my teachers and classmates had high expectations for me, but I failed to make it to the finals – the reason was that I didn’t study hard enough before the exam; I was too proud. The role of math class representative was also taken away by the math teacher (I used to be the math class representative). Thanks to my hard work in studying, I was successfully admitted to the school’s key high school. High school: Due to excellent results in the entrance exams, I was placed in a top-tier class. There are two elite classes in total, and I was assigned to one of them. During high school, I continued to suffer from stomach problems and took stomach medications almost constantly. Fortunately, my stomach issues did not flare up during the college entrance exams, so they didn’t affect me at that time. I get along very well with another classmate from the countryside; my relationships with the other classmates are average. I feel like the type of person who is particularly close to just one or two classmates, while having only average relationships with everyone else – in other words, \"few but quality\". However, due to academic reasons, that classmate was assigned to another class in the 11th grade and became distant from me; gradually, we stopped contacting each other as much. In high school, I mostly studied on my own; I never attended the teachers’ lectures. The teacher would teach while I studied by myself, using supplementary textbooks to learn, with little follow-up to the teacher’s teaching approach. Because I was unremarkable, the teacher hardly knew me; I rarely answered questions in class and almost never raised my hand to answer them – I would only respond when the teacher called on me. My math grades in high school were decent, while my Chinese grades were average. However, after being made to stand and scolded by my Chinese teacher once, I decided to work hard on my Chinese skills; my Chinese grades started to improve from my senior year, and I scored 110 points on the college entrance exam in Chinese, which I’m quite satisfied with. I hardly ever listened to the lectures in chemistry and biology classes, so my grades in those subjects were poor. In the college entrance exam, I scored 127 in mathematics, 110 in Chinese, 110 in English, and almost full marks in physics; however, my scores in chemistry and biology were very low, which significantly dragged down my overall score. In the end, I was admitted to Beijing Jiaotong University, and I’m very satisfied with that. I had hardly any good friends by the time I graduated from high school; I felt like I was unremarkable during those years and was looked down upon by my classmates. During college: Since I didn’t study seriously, I was placed in level C for both mathematics and English (with levels A/B/C, and I ended up in the lowest level). Given my scores on the college entrance exam, I should have been in level A or B, but failing to study at all before the exams led to this outcome; as a result, I was looked down upon by others throughout my college years. In my first and second years, I didn’t study seriously*; I even ended up in last place. I just followed others around without doing anything on my own. I started to study seriously* from my third year, and my grades improved during my third and fourth years. I didn’t do anything meaningful during my college years; I wasn’t interested in playing basketball or soccer. Moreover, due to my introverted personality, I didn’t have any close friends. As a native of Beijing, I was also isolated by students from other places (students from other regions considered people from Beijing to be superior, so they preferred to isolate them). I like to play with classmates who have flaws, maybe because I have flaws in my own personality as well; that’s why I prefer to be around people who share similar issues. College was extremely stressful; during my junior and senior years, I did almost nothing other than study in my room. During my senior year, I suffered from kidney stones, which were later cured through traditional Chinese medicine treatment. From then on, I developed a strong interest in traditional Chinese medicine and read many books on it, such as \"The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon\" and \"Ancient Chinese Medicine and the Concept of Circular Movement,\" which helped me gain a deeper understanding of it. Thanks to my hard work in studying, I was able to find a job upon graduation. After starting work: I began working in 2007. From 2007 to May 2008, I worked in Beijing. From June 2008 until April 2012, for about three years, I was on business trips outside the city; as a result, I had less and less contact with classmates and friends. I felt more and more isolated, and now I gradually dislike interacting with people and prefer to be alone. Working overtime is common in this job; from October 2008 to April 2009, I worked overtime for 5 consecutive months, working until 11 p.m. every day, with no weekends. After the project was completed, I was forced to resign. The reason for resigning was simple: if I hadn’t resigned, I would likely have died from exhaustion. Later, when I looked for a new job again, from November 2010 to January 2011, I worked overtime for two months in a row, working until 11 p.m. every day, without any weekends, and I almost died of exhaustion in Deyang, Sichuan. Later, I was assigned by the head office to a smaller company. The manager of that company (whose name is Wu Yaojun) failed to pay me the travel allowance for three months, an amount of around 10,000 yuan. When I called the manager to demand payment, he tried to dodge my request with empty promises. Angered by this, I was unable to work properly for about a week, constantly preoccupied by angry thoughts and almost going crazy from frustration. It was May 2011 at that time; there were problems with my mind (I kept having random thoughts that I couldn’t control), so I was forced to return to Beijing for treatment. The Anding Hospital diagnosed me with schizophrenia. Perhaps it’s because of my appearance, which makes me seem easy to bully; whenever I go on business trips, people look down on me or bully me. After several such incidents, I was almost driven crazy. It’s likely because I don’t know how to cater to clients by acting subserviently, which is why I often suffer from various forms of bullying and contempt from them. By the way, after starting work, I fell in love with a female colleague named Zhong Fang, because she was the first colleague to speak to me on her own initiative (usually few people talk to me voluntarily). I fell in love with her; I think about her every day, both during the day and at night. I can’t do my work properly because I can’t concentrate, but she has no idea. Later, she separated from me due to work, and I can never forget her. I thought about her for two years, every day; I couldn’t sleep at night, and it even reached the point of delusion – I kept thinking that she liked me and was planning to go on a date with me somewhere. This incident also had a significant impact on me; it was like suffering an injury of sorts. I guess everyone has to suffer an injury at some point, huh. One shouldn’t take romance too seriously; if you do, it’s yourself who will end up getting hurt. The problem now is that my mind keeps wandering off to random thoughts, thinking about things from the past when I was bullied; I can’t forget those things, I can’t concentrate, and it has a big impact on my work. I don’t know what to do I feel like I’ve been under constant stress for a long time. I started having stomach problems in middle school, and it’s been over a decade now; I’ve been in a depressed state ever since, with hardly any moments of happiness. I feel like I’m on the verge of breaking down due to this mental stress, and I don’t have any way to relieve or express it I’m also inexperienced in interpersonal interactions; without them, I feel as though I’m isolated from the world. My name is Wang Dashu; I grew from a small tree into a towering giant.