Updates on life
Someone said to me, "man I wish I have your life!" and I was like "man, I need to practice gratitude"
Salut 2023 :) It’s been a minute since I came on here and spoke some wisdom to you all. My life, well as usual, there has been so much going on. There is literally never not a time that nothing entertaining is happening in my life, good and bad , lows and highs. There is always something my friends and other peers I speak to on Instagram tells me a lot, and that is “Megumi, you are always out and doing stuff. You seem so busy”. This used to annoy me a lot. Instagram has been around enough, I do hope that people know Instagram is not the entirety of someone’s life. It annoyed me because of course there are moments during these going outs and having amazing food, I’m crying my entire eyes out over a guy who doesn’t pay attention to me. I’m crying at my house alone shouting “I’m literally going to die alone”. I’m crying so much that the next day, I’m lying in bed in the morning with ice packs on my puffed up eyes. No one knows that dark part of my life and I hated that people think I have a ‘perfect life’.
My best friend even recently told me that I do have the most amazing life or at least it seems that way on paper. She said “You have the most amazing life with amazing people around you. I wish I’m more organized like you so I can display my life in that way” This is something I actually never thought of. Is it about organization? Do people think my life is ‘perfect’ because I’m just highly organized in showcasing my life? I do like to stage things in front of me and take a photo or a video and show people what I’m doing. I do have my phone on standby so I can always ‘capture the best moments.’ This reminds me of a good conversation I heard on the Life Kit podcast, “How to take better (and more distinctive) photos on vacation". Taking photos consciously, and not taking everyday latte photos like everyone else will. I think of my life as a product that needs to be sold to the public eye formed in glam and shiny objects. I genuinely believe that this comes from all the years of working in sales. Learning how to pitch something that is moderately ok into something you MUST buy. I might be unconsciously tricking people into thinking, “Yes indeed, my life is shiny and perfect”. Once the tricking has been successful and I get comments like ‘you are always out’, I feel triumph but then immediately empty because I’m crawling in bed crying the next day.
Although, there is one thing I do consciously and perhaps put in the effort of doing so more than others and that is to find ‘fun’ or creating plans to look forward to. I recently tweeted ‘Damn I’m so good at making future plans to excite myself’. It all came to me that this thing of making plans and doing something fun outside of your daily life for yourself, is not something everyone is innately good at doing. I just received one of my favorite newsletters by Caroline Cala Donofrio, Between a rock and a card place that spoke exactly about this concept of ‘fun’ on her recent issue, Are we having fun yet?
“Fun,” as she defined it, doesn’t have to be lavish or time-consuming or overly special, but it does have to be outside the realm of the everyday. Something to look forward to. Something different, involving planning or presence or the making of memories. A purposeful kind of leisure.
As Caroline writes in her newsletter, she was saying to her doctor why yes, of course I have fun, I watch TV, I run and I go to bars occasionally but according to her doctor, fun means to create a purposeful kind of leisure. A thing that needs planning. Then something clicked in me. When I was having a massive breakdown and I was inappropriately depressed in March-April in 2022, I lost one thing that truly enjoy doing. Which was meeting new people in foreign countries. All through the pandemic, like most of us, my definition of ‘fun’ was taken away from me and I truly did not realize this until recently. My ultimate purpose in life is to travel and meet new people and make new friends. I am very proud of how many of my friends are geographically placed all over the world. Before Covid, I also remembered that people used to visit Japan a lot. I had a chance to catch up with my friends from abroad and show them around, and I also had an excuse to go out and see Tokyo through a different set of eyes. I forgot this feeling because since last December or so, so many people have been traveling back to Japan and I'm meeting new people once again in my own home. Also I traveled for 2 months in Europe last year as well. I was constantly doing what I loved in the last part of 2022 and I wasn’t able to do that for 2 years or so! I completely forgot how to excite myself. You know when you’re little, your mom knows exactly what to give you when you’re upset to make you shut the fuck up? Well, as adults, we have to figure that on our own. It’s also the beautify of getting older. You become wiser in what you like and dislike, and you get better at exciting yourself. Me and my best friend goes to the same eyelash stylist, and my friend told me what the stylist told her once when things aren’t going well for her. “When I feel like I get overwhelmed with work and my sight because close minded, I physically go to a higher building or somewhere that will allow me to see things from above”. Fucking profound. Me and my friend concluded that “as adults, we know how to treat ourselves and how to make our day better”, and that night, I got myself an apple pie from this pie shop near my house and got a bottle of wine at a nice wine shop and enjoyed it at my humble home. Treat yo’ self babes.
Now, moving on to some life updates.
Work
The MOST asked subject! Here is my current status that could potentially change soon, meaning going back to corporate once again. I’m a freelancer now. I generally just help out agencies with bilingual things, and I’m working at a company that creates content and I am on their editing team. This, is very exciting. I’m able to also slightly touch on project management and that’s fun too. I don’t work 5days a week now. I only work 3 days a week (or 4 depends) and I go out truly whenever I want to. I have a very ‘care-free life’ but I also have a huge urge of making more money. Frankly, I need to earn more money and freelance is in fact difficult to sustain basic income. I will want to talk about this in depth in the future, but freelancing is too ‘free’ for someone like me who is a control freak of her life. There is too much wiggle room, everything is up to you(literally), and I need structure in my life. Freelance is fantastic for people who love to work from anywhere and anytime. Currently, I lack structure and therefore I go out a little bit too much than I used to. It’s very difficult and honestly, it will be a lie if I say I’m not struggling job wise at the moment.
Friendships 👫
I feel like it’s at the best it has ever been. I know how to rely and be vulnerable to my friends now. Last year, when I was depressed, I had so much difficulty confiding in my friends because I thought that was a sign of weakness, a sign of I can’t deal with my feelings. I was wrong. Many of my life decisions and inspirations now come from my best friends around me. I now make an effort to travel with friends. I try to see them once a week. I try to text them more. I never said this out loud to them yet … but I do love them. (*please don’t tell them that I said this*)
Romance 💌
I have someone I like. It’s Mr X. (Please refer to here) It was good until... the new year has started. He is acting like what we had last year didn’t happen. It’s…weird. I constantly think about him. I try to go see him. I’m basically throwing myself at him (ouch), and I’m getting nothing. This guy has my entire attention but he is unresponsive. I hopelessly believe that we still have a story to tell, and I’m not giving up on our story yet, but let’s just say, I haven’t had sex in a long time, and haven’t gone out on a date either in a while, so my romantic life is as bland as the salad I made myself the other day.
Family 👨👩👧
I think my relationship with my mom can be improved. My mom is going through some serious medical issues, and it’s difficult for me to show up for her now. It feels like my mom is turning into a child and I don’t want to see her that way. I want to keep her as my mother, as someone who cares for people, but it’s changing. I don’t want to face the fact that my mother is aging and I will have to take care of her at some point. My inner child burst out, can I be the child for a little bit more? My Japanese Grandmother passed away in November. I would like to talk about the funeral experience because something that I thought was as a formality, ended up as a very profound serene moment for our family. Seeing my father cry twice at age 30 was… a strange feeling. It felt like my inner child was bursting out again. As much as this sounds selfish, I was thinking, I thought the children were the ones who are allowed to cry, if my parents cry, who is going to cuddle them and tell them, everything is going to be alright. Then it hit me, my father just lost his mom. The person who says everything will be alright, is now gone. Families are difficult but I also want to try to keep a relationship with them this year.
Cultural Recommendations
Books 📚
-Hopeless romantic By Dolly Alderton
Can you imagine having a book that’s titled hopeless romantic, when literally you are one? Let me just leave this here. ‘it’s a humiliating thing, the plight of being a romantic.’
Podcast🎤
God, this was so good! I heard so much about it last year, but it’s definitely worth a listen.
Katherine Ryan A positive home birth story
Reads 📕
-‘World’s Best Restaurant’ Noma Is Closing in 2024
-‘Convenience Store Woman’ Casts a Fluorescent Spell
-It’s Weirdly Sexy When Hot White Dudes Cry
-WHAT YOU LEARN FROM EATING ALONE
I loved this piece so much and it was such an inspiration in writing. “Talking creates connection. Connection creates love. Love gets us through shit”.
Movies🎥
-CHA CHA real smooth
Wow. What a fucking great film! Male vulnerability in full display! It’s so beautify and also Dakota Johnson is just so … hot.
-Saint Frances
It seems like everyone was watching this, but it was very delightful. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m an agnostic feminist”
-NOPE
Keke Palmer ladies and gents.
-Frances Ha
This is the end! Thank you so much for reading once again, and I’ll be back real real soon to talk shit about Mr X and why he’s so hot but he doesn’t respond to my love. xoxo Megumi