Have you experienced domestic violence throughout your upbringing, feeling mentally defeated and as if life has fallen into a predicament?

From a humble background, I grew up in a fourth-tier city in Henan. My ancestors were all employees of the same state-owned enterprise for three generations. My parents belong to the 1960s generation, with high school educations and as workers in an energy company. They dedicated 30 years to a single post, lacking awareness of survival and with outdated thinking. They were both laid off during the downsizing wave of economic downturn and are now both retired. Before their retirement in 2013, they each earned about 1,200 yuan per month (the company's performance was indeed poor), with my mother now receiving over 2,000 yuan per month after her formal retirement. My father, who is 10 years away from reaching the age for formal retirement, currently earns only 500 yuan (which has fallen below the poverty line, where is his dignity?). This is the current state of our family. I am now 26 years old and female. I have been unemployed for five months and have been living at home, feeling listless every day, living under the same roof as my parents in a 100-square-meter apartment, never helping with household chores, and spending all day at internet cafes playing video games. Filled with negative energy, I have become increasingly isolated and fearful, and I have felt a despair that is almost unbearable.

The root of my misfortune begins with my father's story. My father was an orphan. My grandparents were ordinary farmers in Henan before they worked at the same state-owned enterprise. Due to poverty and lack of education, my grandfather did not marry my grandmother until he was 40. Later, he discovered that he was infertile and ran to Shanghai to adopt my father and his older sister. Being an adopted child meant being pampered, which was the root of my father's behavior. My grandparents were kind-hearted, and in the outside world, they were easily bullied and endured hardships. Their inability to fight and excessive pampering of their children gave my father a twisted childhood. Although he was handsome and praised by everyone, he was often teased for being an adopted child from Shanghai, a big girl's son, and someone not worthy of being seen. My father grew up in an environment where he was culturally backward, poor, and ostracized, with his own good looks and unpopularity. At 17, after graduating from high school, he went to work as an employee in a state-owned enterprise, switching between various positions until 1998 when he became a sales and marketing manager. He often traveled for work, attended many drinking events, and ran around the country until 2008 when the entire industry experienced a downturn and layoffs. He then started going to work every day, with the factory struggling and people in a panic. At the age of 40, with no advancement in his position, he remained at the bottom, had a poor relationship with his superiors, and had no friends besides his classmates. It was not until early 2015 that he managed to retire early, receiving only 500 yuan per month, with his full salary coming only at the age of 60. If all men have self-respect, I feel that my father's self-respect is negative and extremely inflated, which led to the tragedy that unfolded later.

As for my mother, my grandfather was from Anhui, and he was an orphan at 13, serving in the military all over the country before being injured by a bullet in the Korean War and then being discharged and transferred to a small city to work as a machine tool worker, with a decent salary at the time. My grandmother was from Hebei, with a difficult family background. She was prevented from attending university by her family, who did not provide her with tuition, and she ended up joining her relatives and working at my grandfather's enterprise. She later worked as a union member and a kindergarten principal until she retired. My mother was the oldest of her three siblings, with a personality like her grandfather's: silent, stubborn, strong, and ambitious. She became a junior engineer and later pursued a technical college degree, working for 30 years in a quality control position. I have never been able to truly understand what it is like to have a job that is just getting by for decades, while the outside world is changing rapidly.

I was born in 1990, when my mother was 27 and my father was 25. We lived in the residential buildings of the factory compound, attending the kindergarten and primary school there, seemingly peaceful. Until I was 12, when we moved to the center of the fourth-tier city, I started my nightmare. When I was in kindergarten, I was a bit smarter than other children, climbing walls, fighting boys, and being summoned by parents to take me to the hospital to see if I had ADHD. Later, in pre-school, I always scored double hundreds and was always among the top students. I was pretty and lovely, and everyone liked me. However, at the age of 9, I suddenly became self-conscious. That year, I started to have myopia. I was not paying attention in class, couldn't focus, and my grades gradually fell to the upper middle. The teacher felt something was wrong with me and repeatedly counselled me. Later, I didn't fall behind in my studies, serving as the class monitor, homework representative, student union member, and flag bearer, winning first place in the 100-meter sprint in school. My mother took care of my meals and my father was often away on business. Life seemed peaceful, with the label of a good student firmly attached. My parents' pride was satisfied. The brilliance of the early years was fleeting. From junior high school on, I changed completely.

When I was 12 years old, I entered junior high school. My parents arranged for a false primary school record to allow me to attend the best junior high school. My first setback in life was when the false record was exposed by a teacher at registration, making me feel humiliated and crying home to say I couldn't go to school. After finding someone, I still managed to get in, but for someone like me who had always been smooth-sailing, it seemed that I couldn't handle any setbacks. I was resistant to the school itself. Until the entrance exam, I scored in the top 10 in the grade, entered the best class, ranked fourth. I met the most responsible female teacher, and my nightmare began.

The environment in elementary school was a factory-run school, where I started to feel that the students in the best junior high school in the city were not the ones I had been accustomed to. They were cunning and skilled in conversation, while I, with no social skills and no communication skills, was like someone running naked, constantly hitting walls. For the first time in my life, I saw children from wealthy families, who dressed in brand-name clothes, postured, and fought for their parents, engaging in fierce competition. I was like a confused bee, my words and actions not aligning with the consensus of social interaction, feeling isolated and ignored. I became a "dumb blonde," with short hair, not paying attention to my appearance. Although I had been the representative of physical education and physics, my grades were no longer as good as before. I never fit in, and when I was occasionally bullied, I couldn't feel it or respond to it. When I was ostracized, I didn't react, just staying by myself. In my adolescence, I was lost and helpless, and I focused all my energy on studying, no matter what happened around me. The teacher treated me like a genius, but later found that my ranking was in the middle, and concluded that I had forged my entrance exam score. After a year, my grades improved to the top 20 in the grade. The backgrounds of my classmates were from the most privileged families in the fourth-tier city, with parents who were bureau directors, bank managers, university professors, and education directors, etc., holding important social positions. I always felt like I was lower than everyone else, and the teacher did not show me more concern. I started to have a feeling of wanting to throw things away, and in adolescence, I started to rebel against my parents' control. My father started to be violent at home, hitting me first when he didn't agree with me. Later, the memories of family life were endless quarrels, scoldings, denunciations, and loathing. I started to have a hidden awareness that my parents were from a poor family and were unworthy of being seen. Besides studying, social isolation, loneliness, inferiority complex, being beaten, and feeling unworthy all began to emerge. In the junior high exam, I barely passed with average scores, spending 20,000 yuan to get into the best class of the best high school. Unfortunately, I was the last in the best class. I didn't expect that high school would be my first major setback.

The high school was a full-time boarding school, one of the best in the city. From running and reading at 5:40 in the morning to going to bed at 10:00 at night, the curriculum was so packed that I had no time to spend with my family, and I couldn't help but feel sad. But at 15, my mind was still unstable. I had a half-day off every week, and I had already formed a deep-seated fear of going home. Whenever I went home, my heart would race, I would be tense, and I was always ready to fight my father's physical fights. Yes, from running away from being beaten and crying in elementary school, I had become a fighter, a resistor, and angry. My emotions reached a peak, and I often had to confront my father with crazy resistance and shouting. My father was tall and strong, and I couldn't fight him, but I was unyielding and kept fighting back. I once fell and hit my head, suffering a mild concussion and lying in bed for three days, feeling dizzy and vomiting. I once had my wrist ligament injured and swelled up after being kicked by my father, and I couldn't extend my fingers or twist my arm lightly for a week, crying in pain. I was once kicked to the ground by my father at the dining table, spraining my ankle and damaging the ligament, and I limped for a month. Due to frequent beatings, my parents didn't think it was serious and didn't take me to the hospital for timely treatment, leading to permanent ligament damage. Years later, when the condition worsened in 2015, an MRI showed that the damage was irreversible, and I was told not to wear high heels, to wear a brace, and not to bear too much weight. I gradually accepted the physical imbalance and accepted the strange looks from others, and I believed I was disabled. These further affected my work.

When I was in the second year of high school, I started reading books on psychology because I realized I had psychological problems. But with domestic violence, a lack of social skills, the pressure to study hard, and the idea of being obedient and compliant, I suddenly broke down. Deep in my heart, I believed I was the worst, the most hopeless, an outcast, a psychological pervert. Once, when I was in a math class, I cried for a whole class because I couldn't understand a question. Later, if I couldn't understand something in class, I would cry, and my self-pity and low mood continued. I became dull, with a dead heart, and couldn't focus on studying. As a science student, I couldn't keep up with my studies, and one missed class led to a chain reaction. I started not handing in my homework, and when the homework representative checked it, I would stubbornly say I hadn't done it. When I was a class representative, I wouldn't hand in the homework. I had become a completely closed-off and rebellious person, resisting all psychological conflicts and bearing all the scorn and disdain. The most memorable memories were standing in the corner, being reprimanded in front of everyone, and feeling both scared and angry when fighting with the teacher. I became an enemy of the rules, an enemy of social rules. I was once the most compliant and excellent student, but now I had fallen to the bottom, feeling useless and out of place. In high school, I became rebellious, openly refusing to study, handing in blank papers, standing in the corner when punished, never notifying my parents when asked to, running away to the playground during self-study hours, and avoiding teachers like a cat avoids a mouse. I was ashamed, proud, self-pitying, and domineering, with a fragile heart and a resistant appearance. I was poor, had no experience, constantly ostracized, and became a delinquent. Once, the teacher scolded me in front of the whole class, calling me a provoker and a bad egg, and if it wasn't for the principal, I would have been thrown out. In high school, another teacher argued with me in class, saying I didn't respect teachers, and then the teacher cried and left. I have since become good at disappointing people and at throwing cold water from the start. But I still have good morals and am not rebellious, making me an outsider, a person walking in the shadows. I have no ability to fly away with money, experience, and knowledge, so I can only be trapped in this environment, sitting in the last row of the classroom, next to the wall, smoking during class, pretending to be indifferent and self-important, rejecting learning and others. Until before the college entrance exam, I still handed in blank papers in several mock exams. The result was that I didn't study for a whole year in high school, never handed in any homework, read "Beyond Good and Evil" by Nietzsche, rebelled against everything, looked down on everything, and the result was that in the college entrance exam, I finished the paper for the first time, shocking everyone. They thought I had given up and should have dropped out long ago, but I still managed to get into a junior college with my old foundation.

I can no longer return to the hormonal level of high school. I think the restlessness and rebellion in the dark are the peak of my will for life. After the peak, what does it mean? Decline?

Then I went to college, starting a new chapter of hardship. Two hundred kilometers away from home, in a provincial capital city, at a second-tier university in the top ten in the province, in a junior college class. My classmates were not good, most of them couldn't speak fluent Mandarin. After being released from environmental control, I started to step into another stage of hell – failed love.

Low self-esteem and a lack of social skills made me stumble around in society. Having suffered from domestic violence and depression, I was overjoyed when a male classmate showed a bit of concern. I started to be a moth to a flame again and again. My poor family background made me crazy about a meal or a movie. I became a professional in secret relationships. Men never introduced me to their friends, and I didn't mind it, even enjoying this secret feeling. I always thought I was invisible, so I had no social life. I had only one movie, one dinner for two, one overnight stay, and I was satisfied and happy. I have had four relationships in total, about a year each, if you can call them relationships. I have never told my parents about them, because I know it's the biggest taboo. I have never stood up straight in society, never had a sincere and long-term relationship, and therefore, I only attracted short-term, non-committal, whimsical men. Over the years, my classmates and roommates have learned about me, and they have become distant and whispered behind my back.