Let's run with the metaphor from last time because it's high time to brush aside the dust covering up the things in my life that should be giving off the most light.
When I was contemplating the events that had the biggest impact on my life my relationship with Japan popped into my head immediately, as one might expect. It's difficult to imagine where I would be had I never gotten into Japan, both geographically and emotionally. Japan is an amazing place and has been an incredible source of personal growth for me. Even as I write that sentence, however, I sense a familiar flicker of uncertainty in the corner of my mind's eye and I know that it's time I finally confront the vampire that's lurking there.
Sometimes we think we've grown up and outgrown things only to realize that if we don't confront them head-on they only give the impression of having disappeared and instead persist on the periphery, potent as ever, perhaps even more so. I don't really believe in Satan, but that does nothing to the fact that the greatest trick the devil ever performed was convincing the world he doesn't exist.
When you're a nerdy kid and you spend a few formative years of social ineptitude as a result of it, after you pull out of that nosedive and start making friends you find that you'll do almost whatever it takes to keep that old label from reattaching itself to you. It's all in your head, but when I was a middle school student coming out of homeschooling and was super socially incompetent I was also a huge nerd. Homeschooling was the best thing that ever happened to me in some ways, but amongst other things it also left me with a lot of free time that I dedicated almost solely to the delights of various fantasy lands. When you're a twelve year old kid with very minimal human contact and almost none with kids your own age on a day to day basis you'll do whatever you can to find something to immerse yourself in and for me it was Star Wars, Role Playing Video Games, fantasy novels with dragons and wizards, and a wide host of the usual nerd paraphenalia. For two years that was pretty much all that went in, and so that's what I was into as a little guy, which, I want to mention is totally fine, great, cool, no big deal, fundamentally irrelevant to anything and everything, but when I went back into school, man was I terrible at all forms of interaction. Why? Because I liked Star Wars? No, I just didn't know how to interact with people. All I knew was Star Wars. So, I'd talk about goblins or something in a not-cool I just spent two years with my mom kind of way, get weird look, feels shitty, and link that shittiness to NERDINESS, not to what it actually was which is merely an inevitable lack of social ability.
Fast-forward to when I got older, got more experience, got at socially tolerable, got kind of cool. Did I want to give that up and go back to being that hopeless little guy again? No I did not. What was it that made me that hopeless little guy? Being a nerd. Did I want to be looked at as a nerd? No I did not. As a result did I stop liking nerdy stuff? No I most certainly did not. I still loved video games, I spent the majority of two summer vacations doing nothing but read the Wheel of Time, I memorized the entire three hours of the Fellowship of the Ring. THREE FUCKING HOURS! I could do every line. I was a nerd. Which is totally cool, but I still linked nerdiness to uncoolness so what happened to my nerdy pleasures? They becames sins. They became secret things that I wouldn't admit freely to people, or things that I felt shame about if I did admit them. If somebody made fun of the nerdy things I liked, maybe I didn't show it but inside I took a blow. I took a blow.
In addition to loving video games and Jar Jar Binks I also happened to love Japan, and oh boy was that ever an exercise in cognitive dissonance because if you were to ask the average American to draw a circle around the nerdiest region of the Earth it would go around Asia, and then if you gave them a push-pin and asked for the epicenter they would probably plop it right down on Tokyo. Just as like will gravitate to like, nerd will find nerdtopia.
So what did I do? I drew distinctions between the people who liked Japan for it's cultural heritage (temples, tea ceremony, art, re: cool) and people who liked Japan for it's anime and manga (nerd; uncool). I went for years like this, and even as I got more interested in Japan, went there, enjoyed the culture, the people, et. al, there was still a significant section of my brain that refused to legitimize my interest in Japan. It developed further into a guilty pleasure to the point where I felt like I couldn't really take anything of value from Japan into my everyday life because it was somehow too tainted by the quote-un-quote nerdy aspects of its culture.
So I write above that coming to Japan was one of the most influential events in my life. And it has been. I've grown in so many ways since I've been here and learned so many things about myself, people, life, evolution, guitar scales, the one-handed backhand, throwing a bowling ball, how to handle kids and people and far beyond that, but even up until today there was a little niggling in my head, a little unspoken niggling in my head that because I learned all that in Japan it somehow.... doesn't apply. I don't know why, but I do know that it's time that I recognized that out-dated remnant of my insecure past for what it is; an out-dated remnant of my insecure past. I like anime. I dedicated at least 6 months of my life to One Piece and maintain that it's one of the unqualified best things I've ever seen. Manga is good. People read it, they aren't all hopelessly awkward. Japan is a real country like any other, with real people doing real things. It's not an alternate reality, it's my second home and the things I've learned here are every bit as valuable as they would have been had I learned them on the streets of New York.
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