Down in Despair, Trying to Rebuild a Better Life. Life has been a bumpy journey for almost five years. I’ve been through culture shock, hospitalization, a pandemic, natural disasters, and recently an insurance debacle. I decided to move to Japan five years ago, but had I known how difficult it was going to be. I might have stayed home
It might sound strange to those of you who have been following me for a long time. Since high school, I had my sights on coming to Japan and making a living here. Almost five years ago, I arrived and I shared a filtered version of my life on the internet. The time when I met my first girlfriend, bought my 180sx, and then when went to all the Initial D locations. All of these moments are bright highlights of my time here, but I usually didn’t share the times when things were so difficult I thought of taking my own life every single day for months at a time.
Why Didn’t I Take the Blue Pill
As I grow older every goal and dream I’ve had has dissolved to dust before my very eyes. The repetitive losses water your cynicism and color your world. As you’re down in despair you start to relate more to characters like Cypher from the Matrix. The main character is someone with a “reality distortion field” and that person wasn’t me. I see myself more in the background characters with no names. If life was a movie, the credits would read my character as “guy in hoodie #3”.
The one thing I did accomplish, forced me to swallow a red pill about Japan. The best way to experience Japan is by visiting the country as a tourist. Living here wakes you up to the fact that this place is just like any other place on this large space rock with humans. There are good things, but no place is perfect. A sane person would have gone home, fuck I should have gone home. Fuck this place honestly, pay is low, taxes are high, and you’ll never belong here. I’m that idiot trying to shove a square peg in a round hole. I’ve been here for so long that last week I suffered a mental breakdown and an adult tantrum.
Why not Go Home While Down in Despair?
In all honesty, down in despair and stuck in Japan. Not in the sense that I have a mortgage on a house or a family. Despite lacking the funds to go home currently, my parents would front me the money to go home. While I know that I operate more logically than most people, the reason I find myself immobile is the fault of my humanity. I suffer from the sunk cost fallacy, I’m married to my cars, and my books. Half of my books and items are still in a storage unit 7 hours away.
It’s more than just the annoying practical matter of doing the mountains of paperwork and moving all life to Seattle. Being here for so long has made me realize my retirement pension, work history, and even medications are trapped in the Japanese system. So for all the big-brained keyboard warriors out there “just going home” isn’t as simple as it sounds.
What to do When You’re Down in Despair?
There’s some online rhetoric that reads that upon reaching maturity, adult humans become resistant to change. Being a human, I too became comfortable with my situation, thus change became difficult. (Why couldn’t I have been a cyborg cat girl. . . then I could just patch some update files to change.) Sitting at the bottom of a deep dark pit makes you wonder what life decisions you made to end up there. There’s something about having your back against the wall that makes you want to change everything. How being at the bottom of a lake gasping for air awakens that hunger that you forgot you had.
Down in Despair, trying to rebuild a Better Life is the only option you have. It was time to look into the mirror and “make that change” as MJ said. Since money had been a problem for me it was time to learn about how it worked. If I Set budgets for my personal spending that skill would come in handy for my career and eventually for running my dream business “Touge Legends”.
Starting Small
Often when people want to make changes, they try to change too much at a time. You only become more desperate down in despair. To keep things simple, I want to just try to focus on little things. Even though I have big goals like “change the way used Japanese sportscars are sold forever”. I need to focus on what I can control now. “Start where you can start” as Jordan Peterson says. Fix the things that you repeat every day, I’m not above fixing the mundane things, because according to Dr. Peterson those are the most important things to fix.
What will I Fix?
Moving forward this week I’d like to focus on creating more content, waking up early, and playing guitar.
I want to do so much but I’ll start small. Japanese learning looking at me in the corner.
