On the road to nowhere, a spiritual experience changed everything

Depression had me in its grip, but one day, for seemingly no reason, the world suddenly looked brighter.

- Zhang Ruihe

By any measure, 2004 was a terrible year. I was 27, newly broken up after an unhappy relationship. Yet, leaving the relationship didn’t make me happier, either. At work, I'd been drafted into an “elite” team tasked with pioneering a new initiative I didn’t believe in. My form class at the time was the most notorious in their cohort.

It was also the year of my father’s failed brain surgery. He'd gone into the operation walking; he came out half-paralysed. My parents’ relationship had already been strained and distant, and family life became very difficult.

My friends were taking off for work and studies overseas, or exotic holidays. I was stuck in Singapore, trapped in a life I'd never asked for: family, work, love life, and my dream of postgraduate studies overseas disintegrating before my eyes. I rapidly sank into depression. At one point, my weight was down to 39kg.

But one day, about half a year after my father’s surgery, the depression lifted, and in its place, joy found me, suddenly, for no discernible reason.

The night before, I'd stayed back after a close friend’s wedding dinner for a jam session with the rest of the wedding party, singing and goofing about around the piano. For a few hours, I forgot about everything at home, at work; for the first time, my unwanted singleness felt like freedom.

I went home that night still wrapped in the afterglow of the wedding, fully expecting the grey to reclaim me. But I woke up the next morning, and the glow was still there. I went to work glowing. Went home again, glowing.

The glow continued throughout the week. Then the week became a fortnight, a month, three months, six months. I'd never felt that way before. It was as if my life had become suffused in a buttery sunshine yellow, shot through with shades of terracotta and burnt sienna.