A slow Saturday, and the urge to look back
It was a Saturday, and for once I stayed in my dorm all day without stepping outside even once. Thinking about it carefully, it was probably the first Saturday this month that I had slept past 9:30.
Exam season had already begun, and my Saturday 8 a.m. elective had ended the week before, which made that rare, luxurious sleep-in possible. I had also just finished my genetics exam on Friday, so there was a brief sense of mental release. I spent almost the entire day playing around, to the point of getting bored with it, and only then did I finally sit down to write this year-end reflection.
This was my second year in college, my first full year as a sophomore. The courses became much more closely tied to my major. In many ways, it was a calm year: things moved along steadily, without any dramatic upheaval. But it was also a messy year, packed with little tasks and trivial obligations that somehow filled every day, every week, every month.
I never really know how to begin these kinds of personal retrospectives, but I think I’ve found a solution: write whatever comes to mind first, and follow the thread from there. There’s something satisfying about activating one memory after another.
Learning to deal with anxiety
Why this was the first thing I wanted to write about
If I had to pick one keyword for this year, it would be anxiety—or more precisely, learning how to confront it.
That idea came back to me in medical psychology class one Wednesday, when I saw a particular slide on the screen.
At that moment, something seemed to click. I immediately jotted the thought down.
After entering my second year, pressure started coming from all directions. Somewhere along the way, I had developed a bad habit: I was always unconsciously putting myself on a scale and comparing.
In middle school, it was grades. In high school, class rank. In college, comprehensive evaluations.
That habit has weakened since I started university, but it never fully disappeared. It was shaped much earlier, and things formed that early are hard to completely suppress.
A big part of why I dislike scrolling through social media is exactly this. I get anxious too easily when I see all the polished, impressive things people my age post: photos from research group meetings, snapshots of study sessions in the library, casual complaints about difficult problems, all of it. If it were simply about recording moments of life, I’d have no issue with it. But when it comes to “sharing” that is really about personal progress or development, I find it hard to feel anything like resonance.
To put it more bluntly: I am someone who really cannot stand falling behind.
That was why the slide hit me so hard. Sometimes just a few different words can reveal a huge difference in mindset.
Rational emotive therapy and distorted beliefs
The slide was about rational emotive therapy, a form of cognitive therapy associated with Albert Ellis, and one of the common psychological approaches used in treating depression.
What mattered to me wasn’t the terminology itself, but the basic idea behind it: often, distress does not come directly from external events, but from how we interpret those events. Psychological disturbance is frequently rooted in distorted understandings of reality.
And those distortions are often shaped by early life experience.
That pattern can be seen clearly in depression as well. Certain unreasonable assumptions may quietly take root over time: If I’m worse than others, people will look down on me. If I don’t do what others expect, I’ll be excluded. When a later setback appears—failing an exam, for example—those assumptions get activated, and if they keep getting activated, they can intensify into a much deeper psychological crisis.
It’s actually a simple point, but I realized how difficult it is to notice these irrational beliefs when you’re living inside them. They don’t feel irrational at first. They feel obvious. Natural. Even correct.
That was what I suddenly understood in class: something I had long treated as self-evident was, in fact, unreasonable. The slide made that contrast visible enough that I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
How to recognize unreasonable beliefs
A classic psychological method is to debate irrational beliefs—something close to a Socratic approach.
That sounds abstract, so the classroom example made it much clearer:
The idea is to state your belief clearly, then keep following its logic until its flaws become visible. By drawing out the contradictions or absurd implications yourself, you become more capable of correcting those thoughts on your own.
For me, though, the most practical change is even simpler. I’ve started trying to replace commanding, absolute words with gentler ones.
Instead of must, can only, only if, cannot, should, I want to use words like hope, feel, try to, do my best, want to.
That shift in wording sounds small, but psychologically it feels completely different.
A few thoughts on depression
I had actually wanted to write about my own anxiety for quite a while.
Back in October, while casually browsing blogs, I came across a post by a blogger living with depression. One piece in particular—written on the sixth anniversary of their diagnosis—left a deep impression on me.
Judging by the timeline and the tone of the writing, it seemed possible that the blogger was no longer alive. That thought shook me. At the time, I wanted to write something in response, but when I later sat down to work on my monthly notes, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know how to write about something that I myself might also be vulnerable to. In the end, I left it out, partly because of time, but more because I truly didn’t know what to say.
Depression is a psychological illness, but it affects the body as well. It is not something that can simply be cut away or forgotten. Human cognition, environment, and social conditions can all become part of the path that leads toward it. There is no realistic hope of erasing all of those conditions and therefore eliminating depression entirely. Even after recovery, relapse remains possible.
In that sense, the road toward depression is always there.
What we can do is prevention. We can place signs and barriers along that road. We can try to hide the entrance, remind ourselves not to keep walking farther down it, and do our best not to step onto it in the first place.
Anxiety itself is natural. Everyone has things that trouble them. But those troubles should not become the thing that negates a person, nor should they become the whole of who someone is.
So at the end of this section, I’ll just say this plainly: I hope you find happiness, my friend.
A pause in the middle
That section got much longer than I expected, so this is a small break.
Also, it gives me a chance to shift into the more ordinary reflections that usually belong in a year-end post.
What this year taught me
Strictly speaking, this part probably should have come first. But I wanted too badly to write about anxiety, so I pushed it back.
The truth is, a lot of my year was already recorded in monthly notes, so there isn’t that much left to summarize in a neat chronological way. What I can do instead is write down a few things I kept thinking about.
Why did I choose medicine?
I asked myself this question countless times over the past year.
Why medicine?
The first time the idea appeared was in my third year of middle school. It was a very intuitive thought, almost without reason.
I became more certain in the first semester of senior year in high school. At that point I was weighing time, money, career prospects, and my own inclinations. But even that “inclination” was largely the result of elimination: after ruling out one option after another, clinical medicine seemed to be what remained.
After entering university, my rather idle first year made me waver a little. Then academic pressure arrived and left me too busy to keep asking where the choice had originally come from.
By sophomore year, I was still exploring—but no longer just asking why study medicine. I was asking something slightly different: why did I have that instinct in the first place?
Eventually I arrived at an answer that feels right to me: people and stories.
I like recording things. I’ve kept some form of diary since middle school, and although that habit changed after college, it never disappeared; it simply became monthly blog writing instead. I also like listening to stories and reading them. Stories are almost always tied to people, and a human life can itself be understood as a story.
I like trying to discover something inside those stories. Sometimes it’s a principle. Sometimes it’s knowledge I may never use. More often, maybe it leads nowhere at all. But I still find myself absorbed in that process.
Medicine is a field that remains inseparable from people. More than that, it is fundamentally a discipline about human beings. In future work, it almost certainly means dealing with people constantly. That isn’t to say other professions don’t involve people, but in medicine, the encounters feel different. The stories behind them are different too.
No one in my family has a medical background, so much of what I’ve been exposed to feels entirely new to me.
Of course, novelty fades. But stories don’t lose their color so easily. What makes them special is that even when they no longer feel new, they remain singular. Every person has their own story, and each one is unique. The longer it stretches, the more precious it becomes.
Maybe that is where the instinct to study medicine came from. Maybe I simply wanted, greedily, to make my own story a little more unusual.
It might also explain other things about me: why I want to travel around the world, why random trips appeal to me, why I keep feeling the need to document daily life.
On classes, exams, and whether medical school is really that painful
As I write this, I had just finished my medical genetics exam yesterday. A day or two after New Year’s comes medical psychology, then physiology, then biochemistry. Exam month isn’t even halfway over.
I have to admit, the genetics exam felt like the kind of medical-student exam I had originally imagined: no question bank, no detailed scope sheet, independently written questions, and a clean, ruthless sense of being cut down on the spot.
That was very different from courses like medical microbiology, physiology, and biochemistry, where question banks existed, outlines were available, and there were even exam-prep tools for drilling problems.
In terms of learning effectiveness, I do think the genetics approach probably works better.
I still don’t like it, though.
If I’m being honest, up to now I still don’t feel that studying medicine is overwhelmingly bitter or exhausting. Yes, there are more exams than in many other majors. There are more classes, more material, more memorization. But I still have plenty of time to do things I like. I still often feel like I’m drifting through my days in a fairly lazy, unserious way.
That is completely different from the miserable, overworked image of medical students I had imagined before college. Sometimes I even catch myself wondering whether I’m too idle.
On the 16th of this month, I saw a recruitment notice from a research group working on an ex vivo perfusion system. The principal investigator was quite well known, so I applied with a let’s-just-try mindset.
I didn’t get in.
That set a new personal record for me: the first time I failed at the screening stage.
I had assumed, perhaps too confidently, that things would go the way they often had before. I thought my résumé looked pretty good, and I was probably a little too pleased with myself. Still, the outcome was understandable—I’m only a sophomore, and not especially outstanding.
That may or may not be an excuse, but either way, I’ll try other labs later.
Games, entertainment, and the parts of life that still count
At this point I was getting tired of typing. I had spent nearly the whole afternoon writing, so I decided not to overthink this last part.
I’ve almost never talked about the games I play, probably because they always felt a little too trivial to put into writing. But as time has gone on, I’ve become more tolerant of what belongs in a personal blog. The games I play are part of life too.
I play a pretty mixed assortment of things, and every now and then I try something new on Steam. But only two games really stayed with me as long-term fixtures this year, with a third recently joining them.
One is Arknights. One is World of Tanks. And lately there’s also Mahjong Soul, because my three roommates and I keep playing online mahjong together at night.
Arknights
I’ve technically been around since launch, though I quit for two years in the middle and only came back after starting university.
I still remember why I left: I emptied every resource in my account trying to pull W and failed, got angry, and quit.
After returning, I sparked several limited banners. Still no W. At this point, I’ve accepted it.
The main reason I came back was simple: my roommates were all playing.
Official server account: 德威云田
World of Tanks
This is not really the sort of game people my age in college are expected to be playing. It’s already been around for 13 years, and the player base feels much more like middle-aged dads.
I play it simply because I like it.
I started in 2019, and by now I’ve worked my way through 24 tech lines. At the moment I’m pushing toward the Manticore line.
Chinese server account: 天线宝宝24222
At some point while writing this, I wondered whether these details belong on an “about” page instead of in a year-end reflection. But never mind. I’ve already written them here.
Near the end of the year
The year is about to end, and strangely, I don’t feel much reluctance about letting it go.
In earlier years, there was always a faint sense of emptiness after the clock struck midnight and the year officially changed. This time, not so much. Maybe I’ve matured. Maybe I’ve become calmer. Or maybe I’ve simply become a little harder to move.
Still, there are a few things I want to say.
First, I want to thank myself this year. You did well.
And I think I can do even better.
Then, to the people who love me and the people I love: I’m glad to have you beside me.
And to the friends and strangers who happened to stop by and spend time with these rambling thoughts—thank you for making this small corner of mine feel alive.
I wish you all the best.
In the new year, I hope you can be happy too.