No.648
29 Days Before Turning 36
When I was younger, I thought strength meant enduring everything alone.
I was raised in a highly stoic family. Feelings were not something we discussed openly. If life became difficult, you carried on. If you were struggling, you figured it out yourself. Asking for help rarely crossed my mind.
I witnessed everything when my brother was made redundant just before Christmas. I was studying in the UK with his financial support back then. Neither of us cried. Neither of us really talked about how difficult it was. We simply carried on.
For a long time, this seemed to work.
My first job involved rotating shifts. I would work four days from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., have two days off, then switch to four days from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. After another two days off, the cycle would start again. Overtime was common. Sometimes I worked until 8 or 9 a.m., returning home to sleep while everyone else was just beginning their day.
The job was physically demanding too. I spent long hours standing outside in freezing temperatures, often below 7 or 8 degrees Celsius, with strong winds and little movement. Later came the severe hay fever, leaving me with painfully itchy eyes and making it difficult to breathe.
Looking back, I accumulated a series of experiences that seem almost unbelievable when listed together.
I quit that job after only five months because the hardship became too intense. However, I was living in company housing at the time, which meant quitting my job also meant leaving my accommodation within two weeks.
I temporarily moved into a friend's house before relocating to a larger city for job hunting. My work visa was due to expire in less than three months. I lived in a bunk-bed dormitory while desperately searching for both a new job and a way to remain in Japan.
Unfortunately, the drama did not end there.
I nearly drowned and spent a week in a Tokyo hospital with no family around, missing job interviews while I recovered. When I was finally discharged, my visa was due to expire in just two weeks.
I had no choice but to wrap up everything I had built in Japan over the previous five years and fly home one day before my visa expired.
I had to rebuild my life from scratch at home.
I spent a year living with my parents and working in my hometown before moving to a new city for work. After two years there, I received a job offer that brought me back to Tokyo. Financially, it was a good move, but emotionally and professionally it was undermining.
Then came another difficult chapter.
I joined a new company that stopped paying my salary while holding onto my passport during the visa renewal process. I stayed because I hoped to eventually recover my documents and secure my legal status before changing jobs again.
Eventually, I got my passport back, secured my visa, and moved to a new company that provided greater stability for the next two years.
Around the same time, I started counselling for the first time. It was 2024.
That was when everything began to unfold.
For many years, my life had been defined by movement.
Moving cities.
Moving jobs.
Moving between uncertainty and temporary stability.
Moving because staying often felt impossible.
What I did not realize at the time was that movement had become more than a practical response to life's challenges. It had become a coping mechanism.
It felt safer to move than to stay.
When I started counselling, I thought I was a relatively calm and rational person. After all, I had survived so much!
Instead, counselling revealed something I had spent years suppressing.
The emotions I had pushed down for so long came flooding out. Over the last two years, I have cried more than I ever imagined possible. Sometimes there were obvious triggers. Sometimes there were none. Even a conversation with HR could turn into hours of crying.
Small triggers produced disproportionately strong reactions.
My counsellor jokingly referred to it as "emotional vomit."
At first, I worried that I had become emotionally unstable.
But over time, I began to understand that what I was experiencing was not instability. It was release.
Years of suppressed emotions were finally demanding attention.
The challenge was that I had moved from one extreme to another.
For years, I had lived by stoicism and suppression. Then I was living by emotion and reaction to make up for that. If I felt something strongly, I assumed it must be true. If I felt excited, I jumped in. If I felt attracted to someone, I accelerated. If I felt restless, I moved on.
One of the most valuable lessons from counselling was learning about cognitive distortions, especially emotional reasoning: the tendency to believe that because I feel something intensely, it must reflect reality.
This pattern showed up everywhere.
In work.
In friendships.
In dating.
In hobbies.
Even in the way I consumed entertainment.
I would become fascinated by a novel, a television series, a new project, or a new person. I would immerse myself completely. Then, after reaching an emotional peak, my interest would suddenly collapse.
All of these patterns remained unconscious until very recently, during the final months of being 35. :")
I believe the process truly began in April this year, when the company informed me that my contract would not be renewed.
Of course, I was shocked. But after everything that had happened over the years, and after everything counselling had uncovered, I told myself that I would slow down and do nothing.
In reality, I attended meetup events, met new people, expanded my network, travelled, went to job fairs, explored new connections, and continued filling my calendar.
Only recently did I realize that my version of "doing nothing" still involved a remarkable amount of movement.
I am someone who experiences life intensely.
The challenge is not eliminating that intensity.
The challenge is learning how to create space around it.
Today, with 29 days left before turning 36, I feel like I am finally arriving at the biggest lesson of this year.
The biggest lesson has been surprisingly simple:
Slow down.
Not because slowing down is inherently virtuous.
Not because productivity is bad.
But because slowing down creates space.
Space between feeling and action.
Space between excitement and commitment.
Space between fear and avoidance.
Space between impulse and decision.
Today I declined an event that I had already agreed to attend. It was a small decision, but it felt surprisingly liberating.
In the past, I would have attended out of obligation.
This time, I paused and asked myself a different question:
"What do I actually want to do right now? Do I really want to attend that event?"
The answer was no.
For perhaps the first time in a long time, I chose based on what I genuinely wanted rather than what I felt compelled to do.
At 35, approaching 36, I no longer aspire to become emotionless. Nor do I want to be ruled by every emotion that appears!
Instead, I am searching for something in between.
An equilibrium.
A place where feelings are welcome, but not in control.
A place where I can experience excitement without immediately acting on it.
A place where I can experience fear without immediately running from it.
A place where I can choose.
After years of surviving, adapting, moving, and rebuilding, perhaps that is what growth looks like now.
Not moving faster.
Not trying harder.
Not becoming stronger.
Simply slowing down long enough to ask:
"What do I really want?"
And then having the courage to choose.
As Carl Jung once said:
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
I am finally learning to notice the patterns that have been quietly directing my life all along. I am finally learning how to bring the unconscious into consciousness! :")
🎁
