Just another Friday

Staring out the window at the gray miasma that is the pre-tsuyu season in Japan, I am contemplating the many things that make up my life. It’s one of those days where self-reflection and self-flagellation go hand in hand.

With the news being filled with events drawn from the most dystopic of novels and short stories that I have read, it’s no wonder that I am uneasy. I live in a world where war and refugees are so common place as to almost not be worth mentioning in the news. How can that be news when someone not holding someone’s hand and the fear of the wrong kind of religious fundamentalism trumps that?

But these concerns seem empty when I am so insulated against most of the world’s ills. I think being an ex-pat makes me a liminal figure as I literally live on the boundaries of worlds.

I live in Japan but I don’t really belong and I never will. I am American but because I am geographically distant I will most likely not be affected by what goes on there. I am Hawaiian so I am constantly dancing on the edge of what that means to me and to others. I am a writer but every threshold I cross submitting a new work leaves me wondering why I left the comfortable environs of my pre-submission self (not knowing if others will like my writing is so much safer than putting it out into the world and finding out that what you deep down believe in yourself others do as well).

It’s just a weird kind of day. Those occur way more often than I’d like.