A friend once built a small project that could analyze the keywords of a blog, so my own site became the test subject. Before the results came out, I had already made a prediction: the keyword cloud would be packed with “negative” words.

It turned out I was right.

I think the label started sticking to me sometime in middle school: mentally dark. Whether I was writing essays or answering reading-comprehension questions, I always seemed to drift toward the unpleasant side of things. That was why I hated picture-based writing prompts and topic essays. Other people could always find the sunny, proper interpretation, while I would end up staring at the same material and seeing something that clashed completely with the approved answer.

There is one prompt I still remember clearly. Two little boys were fighting over colored pens. One grabbed a whole handful of watercolor pens but still could not draw anything good. The other only got three colors, yet somehow produced a masterpiece worthy of Ma Liang and his magic brush. Everyone in class except me seemed to understand the moral immediately: don’t be selfish.

My attention went somewhere much less appropriate. What came to mind was a crude old saying about occupying the latrine without doing anything useful. If I were answering that prompt now, I might frame the idea as: bad students always have the most stationery.

By the standards used to grade compositions back then, plenty of my essays were dismissed for “missing the point.” I did not correct the habit. If anything, it got worse. Eventually “off topic” became “extreme.” I wrote more than a few zero-score essays: some that humiliated classmates, some that hinted at teachers, some that mocked the education system. After a while, I could not even be bothered to argue against the label of being psychologically dark.

But from beginning to end, I never really felt that my understanding was wrong. I was simply reading the assigned keywords from a different angle. “A sense of mission” could be understood as “a curse”; “unity” could become “a mob”; “a white lie” could be read as “an escape from personal responsibility.” Even now, I do not think this is especially outrageous. It depends on where you stand when you look at the thing.

In a black-and-white model of education, selfishness is selfishness. Since it is a negative word, no evaluation is allowed to turn it into something acceptable. But selfishness is not always necessarily bad. By the end, even my parents seemed to think my mindset was beyond saving. Their expectation for me shifted from “you should be a little more sunny” to “as long as you don’t go around harming other people, that’s already good enough.”

The thing is, I really want to explain: I am sunny enough inside. I like traveling. When I eat something delicious, I sincerely marvel at it. When I pet a cat, I make disgusting little noises and talk to it in a ridiculous voice. A warm patch of sun in a Chongqing winter can make me happy for an entire day. I cry quietly by myself while watching Japanese dramas. A simple “thank you” from someone after a tiny favor can make me genuinely pleased.

Yes, I often look at things from an angle that other people call abnormal. But the world keeps turning anyway. If I die, the world turns. If you hate me and wish I were dead, the world still turns. If one person outlives another, the world still turns. What I do not understand is this: if I stop thinking this way, does that mean no one else will think the same?

Of course, the answer I usually get is still: yes, it really is just you. No one else is as dark inside as you are.

At the beginning of this year, I started writing every day again. For a while, I would share the daily pieces on my Moments feed. It did not take long before my family warned me: the writing was too sensitive, the content too indecent, the psychology too dark. So I stopped posting there. Then, unexpectedly, they realized they no longer had a window into what I had been thinking lately, and began asking indirectly why I was not posting anymore.

I wanted to tease them: now that I am no longer publishing those “psychologically dark” pieces, has the world become any better? Ukraine and Russia are still at war, aren’t they? The darkness of the world is not driven by people like me who supposedly have dark minds.

Naturally, I did not quite dare send that reply to my family. Because answering like that would, in itself, be considered psychologically dark.

I cannot force myself to think only of the “positive” things they think of, and I also do not want to give up the “negative” things I understand from another angle. The world has not been destroyed because I think negatively, but it has not become better because I think positively either. In the end, somehow, the only exhausted person is me.

For a while, I used to argue with people about the difference between “don’t assume the worst of others” and “you still need to guard your heart against people.” To me, these are two separate things. But many people always lump them together. Their logic seems to be: because we are too guarded, we start seeing everyone as bad; and because we see everyone as bad, other people come to treat us badly.

A more advanced version of this mindset goes even further. If someone harms us, we are supposed to reflect on ourselves first: did we do something wrong, and is that why we were harmed? This line of thinking has a philosophical flavor not so different from saying, “You dressed too revealingly, so you deserved to be assaulted.”

If everyone insists on thinking only in good directions, isn’t that terribly unfair to bad people? If no one understands their badness, then according to the philosophical relationship between opposites, do bad people simply cease to exist?

Fine. Someone has to play the villain in this world. Otherwise, how would all these people get to look so righteous?