Echoes: Do Not Romanticise Avoidance
When I was young, I liked turning a life into one decisive sentence.
Good grades meant I was clever. Falling grades meant my teachers did not understand me. Skipping class was resistance to rigid rules. Enduring pain proved strength. Finding a job later seemed to confirm that every earlier act of defiance had been leading somewhere right.
Those sentences protect pride well at twenty. They are sharp and complete; they leave almost no opening. Walk a little farther, however, and other sounds return: the body that was ignored, the people who cleaned up after me, the luck left unnamed, and the consequences I could have carried sooner.
This chapter is neither a trial of my younger self nor an attempt to turn old wounds into inspiration. I want to reopen several memories and separate four things: what happened, how I explained it then, what I own now, and what I am willing to do differently next time.
Content note: this chapter refers to school violence, long-term insomnia, and past suicidal thoughts. These are personal experiences, not medical advice. Violence is not justified by a victim's character or behaviour. If you are facing persistent sleeplessness, hopelessness, thoughts of harm, or a threat to your safety, contact someone you trust and seek qualified local medical, mental-health, or emergency support first.
1. I Treated Intelligence as a Free Pass
In middle school, I ranked near the top of my year. I also developed a dangerous habit: if I could find an answer faster, I thought I had earned the right to mock someone else's mistake. I dismissed lessons, challenged teachers, and mistook refusal to cooperate for independence.
I was later subjected to violence at school. The school dealt with one teacher involved; another apologised after losing control. For a long time, whenever I told this story, I rushed to add, “Most of the problem was mine.” Blaming myself first seemed like proof that I was honest, fair, and somehow more mature than the injury.
Now I am willing to hold two truths together: violence is not education, and I should not have been hurt; arrogance and humiliation are not independence, and that part is mine to change. The first protects the facts. The second protects the possibility of growth. Neither cancels the other.
When responsibility and harm are mixed together, a story tends to move toward one of two extremes. I become the permanently innocent hero, or I demonstrate my capacity for reflection by finishing the defence of the person who crossed a boundary. The harder and more accurate account allows both judgments to stand: someone crossed a line, and I still needed to change how I treated people.
Afterward, I lost interest in mathematics and tore up my competition certificates. The paper made almost no sound. The consequences lasted much longer. I believed I was rejecting an evaluation system I disliked; I was also throwing away part of an ability that might have continued to grow.
2. The Body Keeps Unsettled Costs
In high school, I developed insomnia.
I could not sleep at night and had no energy in class. Because I could not learn during the day, I feared the next night and the next failure, which made sleep even harder. My homeroom teacher saw falling grades. The grade director saw lateness. My father saw a ranking. I saw a person who had used achievement to recognise himself losing the only proof he knew.
My seat was moved to the front row. Later, my bed was moved into a hospital. I spent two years receiving treatment for insomnia. At the worst point I had suicidal thoughts. On many nights I cried alone in a bathroom and wanted only to sleep.
Looking back, I no longer summarise this as “willpower defeated insomnia”. Recovery is rarely that tidy, and memory cannot establish medical causation. Professional assessment, time, changes in environment, family care, and the activities I found may all have played a part.
What I can confirm is that I began practising calligraphy with my right hand. I had written with my left hand before. Changing hands gave the long nights one small, slow activity that did not judge my whole life at once. A bad horizontal stroke could be written again. Ten minutes still left a sheet of paper behind.
Later I won calligraphy competitions, received high marks for Chinese essays, and gradually slept better. Calligraphy was not treatment, and the story does not prove that a hobby cures illness. It was a handrail in that season: when I could not solve an entire life, it gave me one bounded act to hold.
A small act in a low season does not have to reverse fate. Sometimes its work is simply to help a person finish today and leave a little usable strength for tomorrow.
3. I Mistook Avoidance for Freedom
At university, an English teacher asked me to spell words because I had forgotten my textbook. I got every word right and proudly continued with a short conversation in English. After that, she paid close attention to my attendance.
I interpreted the attention as persecution and called skipping class resistance. Eventually other teachers in the department began checking whether I was present. By the second semester of junior year, I had failed nineteen courses. The university planned to move me back a year, and graduation was close to impossible.
The same English teacher I believed was “against me” spoke with my homeroom teacher, department head, and academic office. She argued that I should remain in my year. The condition was clear: retake nineteen courses, or leave without a degree.
During senior year I carried a heavy bag between classrooms and the library. At the end, I faced twenty-six examinations. Each evening I hated her again in my head, as if resentment preserved the last respectable part of my defiance.
When I passed all nineteen retakes, I nearly cried. Only later did I understand what had changed me. It was not proof that I had always been gifted. Someone preserved one opportunity for me without taking the examinations in my place.
Help does not erase consequence. Strictness is not automatically malice. A person can be grateful for having been held up and still admit the burden he placed on others.
The sentence I now leave with those university years is this: do not romanticise avoidance. Escaping a class, a conversation, or a deadline briefly feels like taking back control. But when the cost is paid by your future self and the people around you, it is not freedom. The invoice has simply not arrived.
4. One Success Cannot Decide for Someone Else
After graduation, I spent four months and RMB 20,000 on web front-end training. Two weeks after it ended, I received an offer from Meituan and was among the first in the class to find work.
The old article interrupted itself here with a joke: “They even gave me an electric bike, a helmet, and a coat. Gotta go, another order just came in.” The joke preserves my voice at the time, but it also exposes something I learned later. A personal result can easily become an advertisement for a course, even when it may have emerged from existing ability, a hiring window, city-level opportunity, practice, and luck acting together.
I therefore cannot use my outcome to claim that bootcamps always work. Nor can I claim that abundant public material makes all paid learning worthless. What a course may genuinely provide is structure, practice, feedback, peers, and accountability, not secret knowledge.
Before paying, check at least five things:
- What real work must be completed, beyond watching a number of videos?
- Who gives specific feedback on your errors, and how often?
- How are employment outcomes counted, and does the denominator include people who did not find work or changed fields?
- Where are the refund, loan, instalment, default, and employment terms written?
- If the ideal job does not appear, is the cost still within what you can carry?
A success story can show one possibility. It cannot provide a probability or carry another person's debt and time.
5. Five Minutes and a Device Are Not Magic
I also wrote about whether five minutes a day could teach English and whether a Kindle or iPad was worth buying. They seem like separate topics, but both contain the same wish: to find a tool that makes change easier without requiring us to face repetition, duration, and uncertainty.
Five minutes has real value. It can review chunks, shadow a recording, produce three sentences, or open the file you avoided yesterday. But five minutes is best at starting and maintaining contact. By itself, it rarely carries deep understanding, complete output, feedback, and revision.
A device is similar. Its value is not settled by brand, price, or the excitement of ownership. It is settled by whether it repeatedly reduces friction in a real task: whether the text is comfortable, material is searchable, annotation returns to writing, and you still choose to open it a week later.
A useful boundary looks like this:
| Tool or promise | What it may help | What it cannot replace |
|---|---|---|
| Five minutes a day | Starting, review, continued contact | Deep practice, feedback, complete delivery |
| A course | Structure, material, feedback, peers | Interest, practice, judgment, employment outcomes |
| A device | Lowering friction in reading or making | Choosing content, returning, producing work |
| AI | Decomposition, explanation, practice, revision support | Source checks, privacy boundaries, final responsibility |
A tool belongs between an action and a result. Once it becomes proof of identity, it easily becomes another form of delay. “I bought it”, “I enrolled”, and “I have done this for five days” are not yet the same as “I can do it”.
6. What I Actually Want to Keep
I once used these stories as evidence for talent, effort, and interest. Reading them now, I would rather keep four less attractive but more dependable conclusions.
Being Hurt Is Not Failure, and Reflection Is Not Self-conviction
Admitting what I did wrong does not require denying that someone else crossed a boundary. Responsibility is not a search for one person who deserves all the pain. It is a way to clarify the boundary and change the next action.
Resistance Is Not Freedom
Freedom includes consequence: knowing what you refuse and who will pay after the refusal. Resistance that enjoys the posture but does not carry the cost eventually becomes another form of passivity.
Persistence Does Not Prove Direction
Effort approaches a goal only when it enters feedback, boundaries, and review. Adding more without evidence can merely increase the sunk cost.
Receiving Help Is Not Weakness
A teacher preserving one opportunity, a parent reminding someone to eat, or a professional providing an assessment can all become conditions for standing again. Accepting help does not cancel agency. It gives agency somewhere to return.
7. Give an Old Story a New Reading
If you also carry a story you repeat, read Narrative and Evidence, then place the story into four columns. Do not search for the perfect line yet. Let facts and responsibility return to their own places.
| Observable fact | My explanation then | Responsibility I own now | Next observable act |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dated, recorded, or checkable behaviour | How I understood myself and others | Apologise, stop, repair, ask for help, set a boundary | One conversation, retest, or stopping condition |
Then ask four questions:
- Have I poured later knowledge back into the past?
- Have I defended a violation merely to prove that I can reflect?
- Have I turned one fortunate result into a method for everyone?
- Which act can this story change today, beyond changing how I feel?
If the memory returns you to persistent sleeplessness, panic, hopelessness, or danger, stop the exercise. Go first to Recovery: Catch Yourself Before You Push Forward, a trusted person, and qualified professional support. No review is worth injuring yourself again.
Closing: Let the Past Stop Speaking for Today
I once believed growth meant finding a cleverer explanation and arranging every failure as foreshadowing for the present. Now I am more willing to admit that some things were simply injuries, some were luck, and some costs do not disappear because I later stood again.
The past does not have to remain at the centre of the courtroom. We can return facts to facts, injury to care, error to responsibility, luck to chance, and the next step to today.
I do not need to prove that my younger self was always right. Nor do I need lifelong shame to prove that he was once wrong. I need only hear the echo when it returns and make one choice that is not entirely the same.
Perhaps that is the real purpose of looking back: not to rewrite the opening, but to stop an old story from writing the ending for us.