Whew! My company recently hired a new writer (after half a year) and it has lightened my workload a lot. It lightened my heart up so much even before the arrival of new colleague that I could read more than 1,200 pages last month. I felt so good!
But things has gone quite strange last week.
I first found that my reading significantly slowed down. Unexplainable fear built up in my heart. Then I got irritated so easily, thinking a lot about my primary school teachers' full-blown abuses. Uh-oh, these were signs of another depression episode. Then by Thursday, I started to feel a lot of energy draining out of me. By Friday, I hoped my life be short and I was aware that I was depressed again.
Well, I might have made my depression prophecy come true by labelling my slower reading speed, fear and irritability as
signs of depression...
When my efficiency drops due to exhaustion, I tend to think about what my primary school teachers did and said to me. Although it has already been 26 years since I left the school that was more like a boot camp or a religious cult's extremely long seminar than a grade school, I still feel I am still under the control of that school's violently abusive teachers.
Over and over again, they reminded me that I was the most sinful person in the world. Over and over again, they told me that I did not understand how much they and my classmates hated me. Over and over again, I was labelled as the source of all evil, who was responsible for the bloody civil war in Cambodia and the horrifying famine in Ethiopia. Over and over again, they destroyed my identity as a Japanese national and a human being... (That is the reason why I emigrated from Japan.) I was like Damien (a devilish boy with a sign of 666 on his head in a 1976 movie
The Omen). In addition, they labelled me as a mentally retarded and physically handicapped child. They even said that I should be thrown into a special facility on a mountain so that I, an eyesore, would not disturb others but would die quietly.
All these things were said by Japanese public servants, who had sworn their allegiance to the Japanese Constitution that guarantees all the human beings' dignity.
Anyway, I was supposed to have an extremely evil mind that would contaminate the entire school and eventually the whole world. Everyday was for me the day of a denunciation meeting led by a teacher and all my classmates. When I first saw a film of the Cultural Revolution of China, I cried a lot because the scene was so similar to my primary school classroom!
What did I do? Did I constantly beat classmates? Did I steal other students' things? Did I try to burn the school down? NO!
I was just a feeble kid, who could not run fast and often forgot turning my homework on time. I was not a bully but constantly bullied five years out of six. Those teachers allowed the bullies to do anything to me but severely punished me when I stroke them back. One of them even reported to my mother that I loved streaking when my arch enemy stripped me down and beat up so I ran all around in the school naked, crying loud! (Their logic is that if I had not been there, there would have been no bullying! So they wanted me, not the violent bullies, to disappear.)
I don't know what made my teachers to label me evil. But I feel I was an unpleasant kid for a teacher to have as a student. I was exposed to information from overseas as my father was a seafarer. I wore a more urban hairstyle. I did not look like a Japanese (so Tokyo cops often stopped me while I was taking a walk at night in my 20s). And I was sick and feeble so I could not run fast, i.e. I would be useless in the next war. (I don't know why but the teachers always talked about
the next war even though it is illegal for Japan to fight any war.) I guess I was simply an eyesore.
But because of that I have always had to face the evil inside of me. I have always imagined it as an abyss that if someone dropped, he would not reach the bottom in thousands of years. I imagined of me falling in the abyss, die while falling and continue falling even after I turn into skeletons and then into dust. It is indeed a chilling image. But I felt I deserved it because I was evil, anyway.
However, it is crystal clear to my intellectual side that my teachers were insane. I know it is immoral to find the source of all evil in a feeble, horrified kid who repeated petty misdeeds such as forgetting his painting set for an art class. It is indeed illegal and unethical to beat a student with a bamboo sword for such a small mistake. Above all, physical punishment of any kind was/is illegal in Japan. I also think it is unethical that the teachers carry
weapons such as bamboo or wooden swords in a school so that they can beat students for any possible reasons (such as looking bored or unhappy). Being a champion of morality while ignoring laws is nothing but immoral and unethical.
I know my teachers were crazy. Even though they said I was evil, now I know they were the evil ones. So I am angry. (I thought I was evil so I deserved the teachers' all those punishments until I was 18 when I found out that any physical punishment was prohibited by a then 30-year-old national legislation in Japan.)
But my soul is still frightened. My soul is still crying under the crushing weight of guilt. My soul is still trying to take personal responsibility for what is happening in Sudan or Iraq...
It caused a big struggle in my heart in last few days. Even though I did not want to label myself a victim, even though many (including some psychiatrists) had told me to forget and grow up, I peeled off all the evil labels on me and put them back to the teachers. And I imagined about all those teachers taken to a court of law as defendants of a criminal case. I let my anger explode so that I could quit being the source of all evil.
I feel good this morning. I guess I have successfully rejected the evil long imagined in my heart.... From now on, I am going to take responsibility only for the things I am really responsible. Well, I know it does not waive me from my share of collective responsibilities (such as environmental pollution or awareness of human rights) that everyone has to bear, though....
Still, I know some part of me (the Ego?) is evil. But so is everyone's.
