I Want to Start Writing About My Life Right Now
This post was automatically translated by AI from the Japanese original. Some photos show Japanese text.
It’s been a while since I last wrote a diary entry.
This autumn, I let go of the work I was holding and decided to leave the company I belonged to.
Now I’m back to my original freelance work, and nothing else.
Honestly, this past year was a restless one.
Since last spring, something about my activities at the company had felt off.
I took on all sorts of challenges there.
I wrote a lot, even though writing was never my strength. I gave presentations in front of people. I studied to make new skills my own.
I tried lots of new things without turning my nose up at them, and what used to be “No way!” became “If I just do it, I can somehow manage.”
I even reached the goals I’d set out to achieve at the start.
But when I asked myself, “So, what do I do next here?”, I couldn’t picture my next self.
I stayed in that dangling state, and a year went by.
Maybe the trigger was the Noto Peninsula earthquake at the beginning of the year. I happened to be staying in Kanazawa.
I had just put my bags down at the inn and taken a breath when the ground shook hard, and I heard the tsunami warning.
I was shaken by an emergency in a place I didn’t know.
Steve Jobs once said in a speech, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?” and I vaguely thought, today might be my last.
Thirty minutes from now, I might not be able to have even a casual chat anymore.
Everything that had been my everyday life might be taken away.
I changed my plans and there was some hassle, but luckily I made it home safely.
An exhibition I saw when I visited Kanazawa again in the summer
Since then, my wish to change where I am has grown stronger.
The day I want to live isn’t “someday.”
All there is, is what I pile up now.
The works, made of layered paper, are beautiful.
Even so, I struggled with voices like:
“It’s a waste to quit something I just started.”
“Isn’t this just running away?”
“What will the people around me at the company think?”
But strangely, several friends around me were changing their environments too, and that pushed me along until I finally decided.
I thought this would give me a bit of breathing room, but then my other work tripled. Ha.
Wrapping things up at the company took a month.
Getting through the suddenly increased work took another month.
In December, I can finally relax.
I love the cut-out sky at the 21st Century Museum too!
I want to stop here for a moment and spend time on my own life.
I want to set aside visible results and things other people asked of me, pick up what I want to do, and be able to carry it out straight.
And then I noticed that “write a diary” was still sitting on my want-to-do list.
I read “Living Like an Essayist” by Yataro Matsuura (a Japanese essayist), and it made me think that leaving things in writing is a good idea.
I scribble whatever I like in my notebook, but I’d like my future self to put things into words that someone, somewhere, could read.
Also, I’ve recently fallen for an illustrator’s blog, a six-year diary, and I love it so much.
If I write down daily events, things I noticed, and things I felt,
then later I can look back and think, “Oh, that happened,” or “So that’s what I was thinking.”
I might write, stop, and start again, over and over.
But I’ll write about my life right now on this blog.
