“Are you married m’am?”

“er… I was married, sir, but its ok, sir.”

“then do you have children?”

“I have a daughter sir, why sir, do you have children too? I bet they must be working adults already, how proud you must be of them!”

“well, I think, having children is one’s greatest dream but it can also become one’s greatest setback as well.”

“why do you say so sir?”

Mr Tan told me the life story of his younger and most loved daughter, who,unfortunately, happens to be suffering from mental illness.

He measured the factors, and puts the blame onto society itself, of what it has evolved into, a hard and cruel society that pressurized and extinguished the flames of those who are weak and frail.

According to him, his daughter was a quiet child since she was young and gave no problem to the family and friends. However, she wasn’t very good with her studies and she didn’t seemed to have many friends, perhaps only a handful that he knew of.

Her depression started when she whistleblew on her schoolmates who were smoking within the school compound and unfortunately, due to the lack of protection and tactlessness of the teachers, her identity was uncovered and thus, started her nightmare of being bullied by the punished students, who were, obviously out to seek revenge or just pure intimidation to her otherwise quiet and reserved self. What sparks her to rat on them was a mystery if she was, as her father, claimed, to be a introvert person.

They started hitting her head every other day and resorted to various ways of bullying, even long after the punishment and lectures for smoking in the school compound. Actually, who would have cared if they had smoked or broke the school rules? It was just the teachers’ duty to mete out the punishment, which are nothing more than a few weeks of detention or correction work order or extra duties.

However, the fragility of a young girl’s spirit and her inability to retaliate, perhaps due to her horror of her first whistleblowing; which might also be one of the reasons that have prevented her to lodge further complaints of harassment and bullying from the errant and unruly students.

And now, being 21 years old and 5 years since the incidents at school, her youth is considered wasted once she is diagnosed as having bipolar illness – and it pained the father so much as her unpredictable behaviours have caused him much grieves and expenses on medical bills and irregular expenditures on materials which the daughter seek comfort and solace in.

“The modern day society has caused many people, people who are unable to catch up, to keep up, to be lost in the dust and left struggling in the trail of defeat or uncertainties. These people either gave up on themselves or were given up by others. But what they need is understanding and more concerns from us, and for us to stop pushing them, stop pressurizing them, to stop asking them to buck up, to stop belittling them and to stop being cruel to them…”

What they needed is just some tiny space to breathe.



Unknown "FireWind" Perplexed - 15 years, 11 months, 28 days ago