Texts

Today is the n:th day in a row now, but it was just so contrastful at the end I had to write about it. For some time I’ve felt this incapability to concentrate at work that was a little bit unexplainable. I have had concentration difficulties before, but that was always when I was struggling with things in life. This time, even though there are always struggles, it felt different and it wasn’t until I wrote a 10 page essay describing my thoughts to my therapist that I understood what was going on. I have been talking with my therapist a lot about different times in my past like my childhood, my teenage years, first years at university, and so on. It seems that through all of these conversations, I have yet uncovered and discovered more about the truth of myself and what my true interests are. Something that might seem obvious, but not if a life is full of trauma and reinventions of identity and “amnesia”.

Let me start at the beginning. When I was a child the only thing I did in my free time was: play video games, play piano, and do maths. Maths that was always above my grade level. I wasn’t forced to do this by my parents or anything, I don’t have those typical Asian high expectations parents, no. I did it all out of my own free will, because I found it the most fun thing there was - learning about new theorems and proofs. I was quite special in this as well - all the way into high school all my classmates were satisfied knowing an equation worked and just using it, but I always refused to use it until I had understood the proof. Luckily, my father is extremely good at maths and uses advanced maths in his work, so I could go to him to ask him for all the proofs there were. It is actually quite hard to put into words why this feels so necessary for me. I think the easiest way to explain it is simply an incessant curiosity. I could just not accept something someone else told me without asking “why”. This was also why my mother was annoyed so much at me, because I couldn’t just listen to what she wanted me to do. It’s simply my personality.

I didn’t have many friends as a child, but it wasn’t something that bothered me at all. In fact, I got annoyed whenever my classmates started talking to me during breaks, because I just wanted to keep reading in the math book and solve problems. I had zero interest in making friends that didn’t share my interest. In 9th grade, I participated in the national math competition for junior high in Sweden and got 3rd place.

When I got into high school, that was when things started going wrong in my life. My mother was struggling with unemployment, despite having an engineering degree from China. This caused a family crisis where she and father fought and shouted during the whole night every single day for about 3 years, with her regularly talking about death. Exactly the years I was in high school. During the day she would be in bed, and when I went to try to get her to get up she would tell me to go away in the coldest tone. I couldn’t sleep during the nights so sometimes I went out and tried sleeping in a playground, inside the slide, looking up at the stars. During the day I could hardly keep myself awake at school. During breaks and lunch my classmates would talk about what they were going to do in the weekend with their family, and ask what I was going to do. I would hate it every time and just want to run away. Sometimes I spent my breaks sitting in the toilet to avoid talking to anyone. After a while I decided to stop going to school altogether. I would go to the first class when a new period started and ask the teacher when the exam is and what would be on the exam. Then I would not go to school, spend my days wandering, or playing piano 10 hours a day, and when I felt like it, studying by myself reading the books for every subject cover to cover, and then I’d go do the exam and get the highest grades. Fortunately my teachers didn’t have a problem with this, but after a year I got a warning that I’d lose my CSN, so I started going again.

When I look back, even though this was such an awful time, I think I really, really enjoyed this kind of studying, where I got to explore everything at my own pace, go how deep I wanted to, during the time I wanted to, instead of being fed by a teacher during a pre-set schedule. Even though later on in university, we also got a lot of freedom, but I don’t feel that that kind of freedom was the same as the one I had in those years in high school. I really didn’t care about anything. I couldn’t afford to. It was the books that saved me. The maths, the physics, chemistry, biology, history, literature, they saved me because the knowledge I was learning was so interesting that it captivated all my mind, brought me to a beautiful place full of order and explanations where I didn’t have to feel all the pain.

It was also during this time, when I was 17, that I read the book “Sophie’s World”. It was the perfect book to tie to every subject I was learning, because it was about the philosophy history of the past thousands of years. This was when I fell in love with philosophy. I remember I was on a ski trip with my parents (one of the only trips we managed to do together during a pause in the fighting). After the long day of skiing, and dinner, I’d curl up in my bed and read Sophie’s World, and although my life felt chronically depressive, when I was reading the book that all fell away and I only felt wonder. The book said that in order to be a philosopher the only thing you have to do is ask why. All of a sudden, it made sense to me why I’ve always done this since I was small. The book also said that most children do this but as they grow older they start taking things for granted and become assimilated into the society and norms, but philosophers never take anything for granted and can keep asking why into their adult years or their whole lives. I thought to myself there and then, that this is what I want to be, that I’d never stop asking why. And I don’t think I’ve betrayed myself to this day.

High school was also a time when I started becoming self-conscious about social things, and when I started feeling odd and bothered that I didn’t have many friends. I had my best friend, of course, and we were very close, she was the only one I felt comfortable talking about my mother with, and it would always feel like a burden would lift. But she had started to develop a lot of personal problems with mental health. At this time, I was 15, I had zero experience with mental health, neither somebody else’s nor my own. I remember that I really was scared about all of this. First, my mother’s depression, and now, my best friend’s health problems. Looking back, it would have made the most sense if I went on to study mathematics in university, because that was my true interest! However, back then my reasoning was, “if I become a doctor I’d be able to help my friend”. So I told myself I wanted to be a doctor.

I also told myself I needed to become better at socializing, to get more friends, and maybe a boyfriend. Since I had taught myself everything I know through books, I thought I’d also teach myself to socialize by reading self-help books. There is literally a book called “How to win friends and influence people”. After reading numerous books, I started doing social experiments, I know this sounds wrong but, it was literally how I viewed it. As time went by, I started to get the hang of it, of course not only from these books, now it comes naturally to me. I think I got quite good at it. Actually, throughout the years I have come to feel that the best way to make friends is just by being authentic.

Doctor’s studies is hard to get in, and even though I had the perfect grades, the lottery system denied me. Instead I studied a related subject, biomedicine, for a semester. I didn’t like it that much, and also I got depressed, so I dropped out.

At this point in this essay I should also mention that in addition to mathematics I was ENORMOUSLY interested in music… and as I mentioned before, in philosophy, in literature. I remember in high school English class we had an anthology book in which different classics that were written throughout history were presented. I didn’t get to read many of them, a few, but I got a good overview of what works there existed and what they were about, and I remember thinking to myself “good gracious, even if I spent the rest of my life reading I’d not have time to read all of them!” but I WANTED to, I really did! A few books I particularly wanted to read was The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, The Divine Comedy by Dante. It wasn’t until over 10 years later I read Dostoyevsky, and I’m finally starting to read Dante. But during all this time, I had just forgotten about my dreams from high school.

Several times I had thought to myself “I want to just study music”, but I think in the end my mother’s unemployment and all the trauma it caused was what convinced me not to. The same reasoning is applied to the other subjects I liked. I was never interested in anything that one could make a living of.

Yeah, I’ll repeat that. I was never interested in anything that one could make a living of.

This is the realization I have come to, after the conversations with my therapist and not being able to concentrate at work.

After I dropped out from biomedicine I remember one day I had a reunion dinner with classmates from high school. I was depressed and totally lost. One of the classmates said, that he had just started at KTH, and studied “Industriell Ekonomi”. He said that there were companies inviting students for dinner and that the job market was so good after graduation. So I thought, “why not”. If it was not possible to pursue my true interests, it didn’t matter what I did. Or, actually I did have a discussion with a classmate about studying maths, and that the job market was good, but when I asked what can I work as, he said something like in banks and insurance firms, and that was when I ruled out that option. If he had told me "you can study and then get a PhD in mathematics and solve previously unsolved problems in history", I probably would have given it a shot.

When I started Industriell Ekonomi in the first year we had a course in Linear Algebra. To this day even after I have finished two masters’ degrees I still think Linear Algebra was probably the most fun course ever. Not because the lecturer was good or anything, she actually sucked, but because I once again had a really good book that was clear and pedagogical and explained all the proofs and I skipped all the lectures and read the book cover to cover. Just like in high school. However, ALL my classmates hated the course. And that was the first time I felt like I was an outsider at Industriell Ekonomi, and definitely not the last.

I am not going to describe all the things that happened in my life during the studies at indek, I am not going to go into detail about the times I got depressed again, the time I couldn’t finish my masters’ thesis, or the time I got a psychosis, or all the bad experiences I had with people, how and why I couldn't play piano. But I can say that in the end I just felt sick of it all. I decided to abandon my masters’ thesis and go study something I loved once and for all. I went to SU to study philosophy.

Immediately during the first class I just sat there mesmerized and thought I never want to stop doing this. To this day I had never had so much fun in university studies ever. I didn’t even take the exams, but I went to the classes to listen, ask questions, talk to classmates, for once I found people interested in the same thing as me! I went and read in the textbooks, and found once again the feeling that “even if I spend the rest of my life reading I’d not be able to finish reading about all the philosophy that has been done throughout the ages”. “Filosofin genom tiderna” books 1-5, was the anthology we used in the course. I have only read a tiny portion in them but they now sit on my bookshelf at home, just waiting to be read. Not seldom have I found myself feeling discouraged by a thing or two and going to the bookshelf, picking out one of them and just after a few pages, once again hope and calmness is restored within my heart.

Alas, reality comes creeping in and I realize that 1) I have a masters’ thesis to finish 2) I need to find a job 3) studying philosophy is not going to help me find a job. I seriously did entertain the thought of continuing to study philosophy and doing a PhD in philosophy and seeing where I can go from there, I even talked to the study councellor about it. But that was also when I got a psychosis.

After I got the psychosis in 2015 I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. All of it came so suddenly. I am not going to go into detail about what caused it, what happened. All I can say is that it caused me so much shame that I thought I needed to forget about all my plans and that everything I did prior to that was wrong, that I was naive and unrealistic thinking about studying philosophy, that I need to stop making a fool of myself and start doing something useful. Shame is usually what makes one stop listening to oneself and one’s true voice, and that was what happened to me. I am not saying, I regret the decisions I made after that, in fact, I am glad everything turned out the way it did, just that once again I pushed away my true interests so much that I forgot that they existed.

I’ve told this story many times now, how my father suggested I study computer science if I so much did not want to work with the business subjects, because computer science also has a good job market. Well, I thought at least this is something I was interested as a child at some point, where I taught myself to program websites. I forced myself to go to university again, even though all of my business classmates had already a job, bought an apartment, some even got kids! During the whole first year of computer science studies I asked myself what the hell was I doing here. It was just a limbo state where I didn’t really feel like continuing but I also didn’t feel like quitting, because I’d just become this homeless person or a person living with my parents for the rest of my life and when they die I’ll become homeless. During this time I also didn’t play piano at all, didn’t read any literature, didn’t read any philosophy. Because I told myself that I needed to “get realistic”.

Now let me be honest and say that there are a lot of things about computer science that I truly love. I LOVE the merging of creativity and logic, the endless possibilities of what one can make. And you can truly put a part of yourself into the things you make. This is what makes computer science similar to music, literature, and art. If I was to be honest, there are a million things I would rather spend time programming, than what I do in my work everyday. And you see, this is what has gotten me into this little existential crisis. I came to realize, that I just don’t feel fulfilled in my work anymore. This became more apparent when a colleague of mine gave a talk about creative coding, giving examples of generative art, 3D-rendering libraries. I started to daydream about it during work hours. I also daydream often about the next story I will write, the music I will play on piano, sometimes during work hours I find myself looking up philosophers and artists and reading about them on my work computer. I end up being overly harsh and critical on myself, telling myself that I’m not being proper, my boss and colleagues will be angry, look, how much time I wasted and how little work I got done today, people will think I'm stupid, etc etc. But it’s time I admitted to myself again, that

I’ve never been interested in anything that one could make a living of.

And guess what? It feels good saying that!!!

Today at the end of the workday I felt completely drained, more so than I've ever felt from work, and I had to take a detour home on the crowded subway and bus because the Pendeltåg didn’t run. I had planned to go to the gym (I go almost every other day nowadays), but I was so tired I just wanted to go home and go to bed. I came home, went upstairs and collapsed on the sofa. I put on my earphones and played the only thing that made sense to play: classical music. I listed to the music mesmerized and felt that slowly, energy and joy started coming back to me, and it was like my brain came back from the dead. I had thought I would go to bed at 18, but after listening to 5 min of Beethoven I literally thought to myself “gosh, I’m in heaven”. The contrast to my workday was so large, it is indescribable. I decided that instead of going to bed, I’m going to write this essay, because I have to. I have to remember once and for all what it is that I truly love in this life and what I want to dedicate my life to.

My therapist had said to me, this is an existential question, and we need to talk more about it. Obviously, I cannot just quit my job tomorrow and start reading philosophy full time. Neither can I change how the world works. But I believe that there are steps I can take, to make my life more aligned with what gives me meaning and joy. And already writing this essay while listening to Beethoven’s concerto no. 5 on repeat has made a stressful and tiring day into one that ends with true satisfaction.