Life on easy mode
This post was originally published on 2024/05/20 on my old website and was reuploaded here on 2024/06/05.
I used to run a blog back when I was 18-19 years old, back in 2021. I took it down a few months after my move to Tokyo because I ran into a wall, creatively, and it made me shy to have nothing to write about. There’s something slightly embarrassing (the vulnerability, I guess) about posting a diary entry.
I have decided to bring it back, for fun.
Full of nostalgia, I rediscovered my archived blog posts, and reading them made my heart break from how much I’ve changed.
It was when I was formally ditching my teenage years to enter the adult world with no goal, no preparation, just a blurry shard of hope I thought would grow upon me.
I was more confident back then. I seemed better equipped to enter a world of new uncertainty. Dare I say, my dreams were flattened, not crushed, but flattened like a grocery store croissant in a lunch pail, or like a yellowing pillow from the weight of laying there, waiting for something.
The move to a big city in a new country was daunting, but the hardest part was to accept that the differences and difficulties I foreshadowed were nonexistent, because I was met with a completely unanticipated set of differences and difficulties, and the biggest evil of them was pure, unadulterated doubt.
On my to-do list were the anxieties of my parents (a classic), the Leviathan level of cool I felt I needed to achieve to fit in with my new friends, deciding whether or not to forgive and forget the people who though profoundly wronged me still lived free in the city, earning money so I could live normally, and doing my best with Exit Number Five.
The last part was the easiest. Arriving at Meiji Jingumae station, riding the escalator up out of exit number five after two excruciatingly long years felt like I was ascending. The warm gray light of the sky slowly pouring from above me as I rose made my knees buckle in. I will never forget how much it meant to me. And of course, I cried, to let out the steam.
Doubt makes a home in you. It lives nervously in your ribcage, like a cruel landlord banishing all your pitiful efforts. Loud and annoying, nothing felt right or good for a long time.
But I feel better now. It had to take dropping senseless, impression-based friendships, quitting pseudo-corporate with a grudge so deep I could have fracked oil from it, taking months off of Instagram, going to therapy again, signing up to language school so I could stop being almost completely illiterate, dropping out of said school, dropping out of therapy too, and finally buying an easel for the first time in my life albeit of shitty quality.
I deserve life on easy mode. I never wished to be pleasing, to be nice, to be craved, I just wanted to be satisfied, you know, stop being so hungry over what I didn’t have.
If I am not as confident as I was at 19, I am now more resilient. I find this idea of fix-it-all self-love is sick. It’s not realistic, purposeful, or revolutionary. What I do believe in is starting over, learning from being in uncomfortable situations, thinking ahead, and double-checking on my desires as I do with my fears.
Often I wonder what would have happened if I didn’t trade St-Catherine’s damned metallic drilling noises and construction cones with the fuzzy speakerphone of the roasted sweet potato truck. But life continues: rats of the same species, trends of the same cycle, rental bikes, and laminated cocktail menus. Something-something about being in your 20s and the grating tick tick tick of the economy. Not much would be different, I would just be me, in another jungle.
Peered over the deep, green ocean of possibilities, I am powerless and afraid, or, I can enjoy the steady back-and-forth of seawater on my feet. Just like Plath’s fig tree, you won’t know if it’s a good fruit until you try it, and you can always sundry your figs and have them later.
I was not ready for this constant uncertainty, and I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. My motto is to let the good things find me and savor what I have.
Journal entry from when I was 19
I’ve been spending a lot of time alone these days. It gives me plenty of time to evade. Time feels infinite these days, but also so listless, so short-tempered and flighty. I’m almost turning 22 - as of today, in two weeks.
I thought I had a chance at being a writer, in one shot. I tried fitting myself into a desk chair like a piece of Lego except I felt like I lost myself the more I wrote. The longer the paper, the less I knew.
Sometimes I tuck myself into bed, and I look at nothing while tears slide involuntarily. I think to myself, maybe I should’ve stayed home and gone to uni like all of my friends and found a normal path, something secure, something that wouldn’t be so spaced out, bumpy, and long.
Sometimes, I think the dozens of rejection emails I get every month get to me. All the polite but stale “unfortunately”s and the formal greetings, they nip at me like pigeons. It’s like some kind of mold I’m breathing in through the confines of my home, my safety, slowly but surely nesting in my body. It’s become a routine, to swipe back and forth through my inbox, press select, and toss them into the bin.
We all have this sort of worry inside. All of my friends bring it up. But nobody really prepares you for uncertainty. Nobody teaches you to wait it out, just glide on the waves, floating on your back. But then again, you can’t always just wait. You’ve got to make ends meet. You still have rent and gas.
It’s the mundane things, like sipping on milk tea on the floor of my bedroom-living-dining, that keep me sane, until I remember I’m on the floor of my bedroom-living-dining.
But then I remember that this is my first apartment ever, and also my boyfriend’s first apartment ever, and that he’s my first boyfriend ever, and in that way, I do win. No career prospects though, no gigs, no art sales.
I still want to model for Nylon Japan, just like when I was 16, when it was my favorite magazine. Maybe it’s just to make my old self be happy. Or to check it off my long long list of dreams and wishes, just to get it off the table.
But it seems further to me now than when I was a kid, and I don’t think I even want this dream. I think I just want to say I did it.
Studio (aka my kitchen floor)
I wonder if there’s an option for me, in the row of doors that I have no key to.
But I think I’d rather wait a long time than go back to where I used to be. I’d much rather sit until my name is called, than to hurry the receptionist, make a fuss, max out my credit card, start making reels, pitch to fragile publications, give up my earnings for a no-sale show at a shit gallery, just to get asked to stay seated. I know where the limits are, and I like to pick my battles. At least that’s one less thing to worry about.
Thank you,
Mizuki
