Confessions of a Gaijin: Episode 6 – The Wall

I feel fucked. And not in a sexy way.

It’s a Sunday morning as I drift into consciousness. I am smeared across my futon and my eyelids creak open. The curtains are drawn so the room is dimly lit, casting a melancholic gloom about the place. I am acutely aware of the fact that everything smells. I haul myself onto my side and survey my surroundings before flopping onto my back and gazing at the ceiling. The ceiling simply hangs there and has no response for me.

I’ve hit The Wall. During my first week of training, one of the higher-ups told us new recruits to do as much as we could to enjoy the first few months of our time in Japan. This, he told us, was the honeymoon period, when everything would seem fresh and new and exciting. Of course though, like anything in life which is fresh and new and exciting, it would be entirely finite. When the honeymoon period was over, he said, we would feel it, and we would feel it hard. He explained that it would seem like we had come up against some sort of barrier or wall that we would have difficulty moving past. So it proved.

My honeymoon is over, and in its place is a series of dull thuds.

It’s been a tough week. The job was always admin-intensive but over the last few weeks the steady stream of paperwork turned into a fucking tsunami and I struggled to cope with it. It feels as if there are too many plates spinning at the same time and I dash about trying to prevent them from falling to the ground and shattering into tiny pieces. There are so many things to keep track of, observe, anticipate, remember, practice, repeat and refine. The to-do list stretches into infinity. There is never enough time to get everything done, not even with early starts or late nights. The job starts each day around midday and I finish around 9.30pm, so there is little to do after work except go home feeling frayed and worn, and it’s gotten to the point where I have to set aside a few minutes each day to sit in the work toilets and have a cathartic sob.

Even the simple things have lost their sheen. I made myself dinner a few nights ago but when I sat down to eat it, it tasted like prison food. I fished lumpen heaps of gristle out of my gyu-don and plopped them into the bin. A week earlier the same meal had tasted like comfort food. Even my cooking is unhappy.

My time outside of work is some weird balancing act of trying to un-exhaust myself while tending to necessary tasks and attempts to enjoy myself. Lately it’s started to feel weird. Nothing seems to flow the way it should. My weekends are clogged with activity but at the same time I feel as if I am getting nothing done. I don’t seem to start my working weeks feeling refreshed or revived, just dubious and tired.

I’m not pining for home yet but I find myself thinking about it a lot more than I should. It feels like years since I’ve left, but I haven’t even been out here for three months. I put on my best happy voice whenever I call my parents so they don’t know that I am having a mini-crisis on a daily basis.

I could try breaking my problems into chunks and managing them one at a time, but there are way too many chunks to choose from. One thing feeds into another in some unfortunate eco-system of ennui. I work long hours to cope with my workload, so I’m tired, I’m tired so I sleep late, I sleep late so I have trouble filling my mornings with the things that happy, normal people do, like yoga and granola and ironing shirts. Time is always slipping away from me, however hard I try to catch up.

I feel like there’s so much riding on my time out here. Early last year I experienced a nervous breakdown and in the autumn, a painful break-up. I stopped feeling sorry for myself a long time ago, but from time to time I can still the feel the aftershocks of both events, especially the latter. My adventure out here in Japan – manifested as both the job and the time outside of it – has become some means for me to redeem myself, to try and put my name to something that won’t end in disappointment or tears or failure. I’d spent years trying to avoid responsibility or being honest with myself about what I wanted, and now I am doing my best to avenge myself, but I wish I’d done all of this years ago, when I was younger and had more youthful naïveté to spare. I spent so many years driving in the wrong direction, and now I’m scared that I’m arriving at the party just as everyone is leaving.

In the midst of all this, I am thinking of someone. Someone who I miss and wonder about daily, someone who is only a few hours away in one of the biggest cities in Asia. I feel like I need this person right now, but it seems very unlikely that she will appear or I will hear from her anytime soon. So I soldier on. There is no turning back.

I don’t feel gypped or hard-done by. It’s my choice to be out here, and I knew it would be hard in places, but I’m having trouble digging deep at the moment. The schedule won’t let up. My colleagues are a good bunch and I have people around me who I can open up to, but what I’m trying to do more than anything at the moment is build my own strength, in the hopes that I can sculpt myself into the sort of person who is better equipped to deal with what life throws at him in the years to come. So I crowbar myself out of my futon and put the kettle on, hoping that if I take enough small steps, eventually I’ll end up making great strides.

And let’s face it, no one likes it when you sound like a little bitch.