# Thinking My Way Out of Nihilism
By Nina Lu · 2022-07-15 · Things That Matter (Medium) · Original: https://medium.com/@ninajlu/things-that-matter-thinking-my-way-out-of-nihilism-898cd2904d56
I went to visit my old boss in DC yesterday who I hadn’t seen in years. After recounting the year I had, she commented “sounds like you went to hell and back this year.”
That is a really accurate and honest summary of my year, which has been, hands down, the hardest year of my life. Perhaps it is only in retrospect that meaning or significance becomes clear. Because, though it was the hardest year of my life, it was also the one that challenged and changed my world view the most. Perhaps it is only by turning to face true darkness and the depths of nihilism, the ugly underbelly of the world, that true beauty and clarity emerges.
I used to believe that depression was an issue of self-resolve. That you could think yourself out of sadness or it was a reflection of your own weakness — your lack of ability to deal with your own shit and handle the vicissitudes of life with self-reliant grace. I can only imagine this was the product of my Asian upbringing, where mental illness is stigmatized, and my American individualism, which is predicated on individual ownership of your own outcomes.
### October
When I was my happiest in October, I walked around Stanford’s campus in elated and child-like delight, marveling at the palm trees and the gardens. I delighted in the consideration that someone had put into something seemingly so inconsequential as landscaping at Stanford —it was artful and beautifully arranged, thoughtfully prepared and considered.
Stanford’s well-manicured and beautiful grounds.
There was always something in bloom — the pomegranate bushes, little yellow flowers, vibrant red bushes, lime and persimmon trees — because someone had put in the effort and time to think about what weeks and months these different plants bloomed and deliberately constructed a timeline so that this was so. I loved the discipline and love that had went into thinking about all of these details, done ostensibly for no practical reason but for the enjoyment, happiness, and pleasure of Stanford students and faculty. Though Stanford was originally conceived as a self-sustaining farm that could grow everything that its residents ate, this approach had long since been abandoned in lieu of corporately sourced student dining halls. In fact, persimmons fell to the ground uneaten. Pomegranates cracked, overripe on the mulch. These were not planted to feed anyone. They served no other purpose than to delight and be beautiful. I thought about my father’s hometown in Communist China, where starving villagers would have stripped the trees bare while the fruits were still green, so that they could lay claim to the sustenance before their neighbors. There was not the luxury to chance the fruits ripening on the tree and being taken by your neighbor when you were starving. Stanford was this bastion of privilege where food was so plentiful, things existed in such excess, that these types of survival mode behaviors would have appeared morally abhorrent indeed. In my happiest days, I looked at each student that I passed on my walk to class and was confused when I saw the rare pair of sad eyes make eye contact back at me. What, in this marvelous garden of Eden, did one have to be sad about? I concluded that if you were sad here, in this most beautiful of places, you were beyond saving. If you couldn’t be happy here, there was nothing I could do for you. If you couldn’t look around you and see the beauty and the detailed thought placed into the senseless beauty of the landscaping, what was wrong with you? Had you just become so accustomed to all of this beauty and so jaded to privilege that you had become one of those lost, ungrateful, bitter souls?
### Post October Nihilism
And yet, this is exactly where I found myself this past year. With the deepest sadness, greatest loneliness, and most profound sense of being lost-and-not-found that I had ever experienced in my entire life. And it was all the worse because it was in this most beautiful of places because it seemed to condemn me to a state I could never get out of. If I was sad in this most beautiful of places, what hope did that leave for being happy anywhere on earth?
This was textbook depression: crippling physical exhaustion that left me unable to get out of bed in the mornings. Life was a chore. I called my sister who gave me the sage wisdom to “just try to do one thing every day”. Even this proved to be a tall order as basic human things like filing my taxes, turning in assignments on time, answering emails, felt like impossibly difficult, insurmountable, interminably pointless tasks. _What was the point of it all?_
In the deepest parts of my nihilism, all of existence did not make sense to me. Would it not be better for the whole of humanity not to exist?
I did not choose my existence and yet now that I was here, I was forced to live my life through. The worst part was I couldn’t even leave because of the immeasurable sadness that it would cause the people that cared about me. I thought about the sadness it would cause my parents and my siblings if I were to end my life, and yet I didn’t understand why they would want me to continue to suffer in this pitiful state. I had no say in my existence and yet now that people cared about me, I was stuck here. I lamented what a burden it was to be cared for! Wouldn’t it be better if no one cared at all! Then I could leave it all. Be quietly tranquil forever and be rid of this terrible and onerous existence.
In my deepest nihilism, music I had once danced on Stanford’s fountains to turned to cantankerous noise. Food turned to overpriced ash in my mouth. “Entrepreneurship” turned to a pipe dream peddled by the ruling class to resolve their own cognitive dissonance and guilt about the inequity inherent in American society. I reflected back with self-contempt and disgust at our privileged escapades in developing countries during a global pandemic, where we sat in fancy western restaurants in gated and guarded compounds, feasting on avocado toast and free-flowing wine. All of this in a country with crippling infrastructure where impoverished locals sold children’s toys by foot along a congested highway on the other side of the guarded gates. How could we stand by, regaling tales of stupid trips we had taken for nothing beyond our own pleasure and entertainment, in a country where it made economic sense for people to try to sell knife sharpeners to feed their families on the side of a highway? None of it made sense. It made me want to puke. _Change lives. Change organizations. Change the world._
Man selling sunglasses along the highway on foot. Cars are at a stand-still due to traffic.
I saw in myself the darkest of humanity — the selfishness, the hedonism. _What was I complicit in and who had I become?_
Empty Amazon boxes littered the floor of my dorm. Clothing, worn once, perched, wrinkled and creased, in piles on my dresser and strewn across my chair. My tub, clogged with my hair, no longer drained. I let things fall into a state of complete and total disarray because nothing made sense and I did not feel worth investing in. This was what my depression looked like and I’m sad to say it hit me really hard.
In my deepest nihilism, nothing felt worthwhile and nothing seemed possible so why try? How childish, how foolish, how idealistic of me to think that I could do anything worthwhile or useful in this world! Who was I? Child of immigrants who had subsisted on food stamps, had come from rural farm land, from nothing. I was nothing and it had been foolish to think that anyone had needed me for anything at all. Even things that I had once prided myself at being exceptional at, I could no longer do. Sitting down in front of my computer to code one day, I found it insurmountably hard. None of it made sense and I could not even write the simplest of scripts. I could not believe that just a year ago, I had spent 200 feverish hours writing and publishing an app to the Apple app store. It seemed unfathomable. I concluded that my brain simply no longer worked. I was a useless lump of ungrateful flesh plagued with interminable brain fog and a useless, insipid brain.
Quite simply, I could not think myself out of nihilism because I did not have the executive function to do so. It is not possible to will oneself out of depression because you do not have the executive function to do so.
I contested and denied a diagnosis I couldn’t accept because it seemed like admitting to weakness, the greatest of all sins. I was self-reliant. I handled my own shit.
### **Emerging from a Great Slumber**
Reluctantly, I hopped on medication for the first time in my life. And then I awoke, slowly at first, as if from a great and terrible slumber.
There were setbacks too. My parents called to tell me they weren’t coming to my graduation because the flights were too expensive. I had taken for granted that they would show up . I imagined myself alone on what should have been the happiest of celebrations, surrounded by my classmates and their proud families. Weren’t they proud of me? Wasn’t this worth spending the money on? I called my ex. He told me that if I invited him, he would show up. After a long pause, “I’m sorry your parents aren’t coming. That really sucks. But you should consider if you want me there or just someone. Anyone. And if there might be someone else you’d rather have there more than me.”
My sister saved me from this tragic fate, telling me she would be there, even if it meant taking a redeye from NY and time off from a demanding job.
I cleaned by room because my sister was coming and I didn’t want her to see my room like this. I didn’t want her to think that I lived like this and lacked executive function. I thought of her using my shower as I unclogged the drain. I thought of her soft feet on the carpet as I hauled stacks of cardboard boxes to the outdoor recycling bin. I thought of her taking eastern time work calls at dawn as I washed and folded the piles of clothing that had once collected on my chair. I reflected on our idyllic childhood. The humid Maryland summers we had spent inventing stories with our stuffed animals in the basement, mastering the optimal 2 player strategy for Klabutong.
In Klabutong, you are elves that have to get presents into Santa’s sled without dropping them.
The laughter we shared as we lowered grappling hooks we had fashioned from paperclips and yarn from the second floor balcony to the foyer of our childhood home, trying to lasso my father’s slippers from the floor below. The nights Julie spent reading _House of the Spirits_ to me until her voice was hoarse and our eyelids closed of their own accord, taking us with them into fitful sleep and the land of dreams. The Indian fire rituals Julie performed on me on the floor of her bedroom to cure my childhood wounds (most inflicted by her during our rowdy horseplay). In that way, I guess it was sisterly love that awoken me from my great nihilism, after everything else failed. I reflected on how Julie hated SF and laughed thinking about how it had rained every time she’d visited me, even though if you live in the bay, you know that it literally never rains and we’ve been in a persistent drought for years. Perhaps, _Frozen_ had it right all along. Perhaps, sisterly love, the greatest force in the universe, does indeed have the power to change the weather.
In the beauty of music, I found the thread of shared humanity again, of the great grief and loss that connected us all and gave meaning to it all. I was not alone. My sister reasoned with me on a call. “You think you are the first person to have ever experienced all of these sad and awful emotions but you’re just not. Listen to Adele’s album that she wrote about her divorce or Kacey Musgrave’s s_tar-crossed_.” Kacey Musgraves is what saved me in October:
> I started a gratitude journal a couple weeks ago where I wrote three things every day that I was grateful for and why. When I first started the journal, I was worried I would run out of things to write about. The Kacey Musgraves album made me realize this would never happen because new things to be grateful for are constantly being created in the universe by other people (for example, a new album or a new show or a new company). This was my first glimpse at the infiniteness and abundance of the universe!
> — Me (circa October 2021)
https://medium.com/media/74ac9b3364c4e39b812de01633f0290a/href
### **Homecoming**
Coming home to Maryland to spend time with my family after graduation has been lovely and so grounding. I know that I am in a good place. There is comfort in the routines: in my father’s morning oatmeal and my mother’s homecooked meals and her daily walks after dinner. In my younger siblings, Sophie and Aiden, I found meaning again. I’m useful for something. If only to teach them everything I’ve learned over the years, new vocabulary and biology and astronomy, and everything I’ve been through — because I have truly been to hell and back this year.
I have so many more reflections but I need to start my day. All of my love. Please remember to treat yourself with the same unconditional love that my sister has for me and tolerate nothing less because you are worthy of love though you may not feel it now. Believe that things will get better because they do, perhaps not on your timeline and not as quickly as you would like, but they do. To be human is to be capable of the greatest happiness and the grandest sorrow, the most unfathomable wickedness and the deepest love.
I will close with a story that my little brother is already sick of hearing. _“We already heard this one like 10 times! Do you only have two stories?”_
After the coding incident where I felt like I couldn’t code for shit and my brain was broken, I took a ride on my electric scooter, which used to be one of my favorite parts of my day in October. I suddenly realized that when I rode the scooter, my brain was doing so many things: taking in external stimuli through my eyes, maintaining my balance on the scooter, monitoring for obstacles and people that I had to swerve around, and remembering all the meandering paths I needed to navigate across Stanford’s campus. Not to mention doing all the automatic stuff I took for granted like breathing, keeping my heart beating, keeping my blood coursing to my upper and lower appendages. Even on my worst day, when my brain is most useless and my belief in myself is nonexistent, my brain is actually doing so much. I realized that I was once not even able to walk or crawl but I learned how to do all of those things. Thus, I am still capable of learning. I hope this gives you hope that even when you think all hope is lost, it isn’t because your brain is fucking amazing and all humans are capable of continuing to grow, change, and return from the brink of nihilism.
https://medium.com/media/58cbe7f9e7a51e5702f69188343fa913/href