On Turning 30 in Tokyo Amid Pandemic
Navigating self, grief, and home while somewhere else.
We learn to think about aging in a negative way, especially when it comes to how it manifests in our bodies and our values. Our skin, our hair, our shape, our hormones — so much of us changes, and it probably scares us. We are harsh beings. Judgmental about age when it comes to accomplishments and success, which is so often something we equal to self worth. Why do you deserve to be here? What have you done? What will you do?
Turning 30 widely resonates as a compression of your measure, some kind of pinnacle. So does the pandemic, as it waits patiently for you to get used to fear, loss, grief, and failure. Why aren’t you thriving yet?
Perhaps we’re hard on ourselves and others because we want to succeed, to be better, to improve. But being made to chase, ever in pursuit, an ever elusive happiness is a lie. It says a lot about our consumerist society, whose encouragement method is to divert then shame, that happiness is disguised as something that exists outside of ourselves, something we must earn or achieve. I’m far from immune to it. I can’t remember an age when I haven’t been trying to actualize a grandiose goal. My relationship to this pursuance is complicated. I don’t want to stop.
All too often I encounter people telling me that what I do is or isn’t productive, packaged as either praise or constructive criticism. As much as I love a day where I’ve happily completed a bunch of tasks (and I’m sure this is what many of us positively relate to as “productivity”) I have come to properly hate this word. Productive. It actually makes me comically shudder sometimes. So drilled into us is this notion of creation that our own identities waver without it. Our language is riddled with it. I find it rare to have a conversion that doesn’t hint or lament at something we should be doing that we’re not. Sometimes my body feels so imperfect in all that it hasn’t achieved that I can’t be inside it. I’m a ghost in places I feel I shouldn’t be.
Just over one year ago a close friend of mine traveled all over South East Asia. She quit her job, stopped everything that was in motion, and left the states. In our conversations about her trip, both over the phone and via long-form texts, she never referred to it as something she was doing to “find herself,” or even “lose herself.” The decision to be elsewhere read more as an innate must; a desire that cost not only time and money, but also emotional strain, excitement and stress. One that also afforded joy. It made me think about where we locate ourselves, why we do so, the narratives we paint in order to understand how we spend our time away or together, and how we justify these decisions to everyone else. I’ve lived in Japan for seven years now, and I still don’t know how to tell that story.
I received photos of my friend sitting at cafes on the streets of Hanoi, a bottle of beer in hand, motorbikes passing in a blur behind. There’s a video of her calmly jumping into a jungle with a harness on, and tales of her sleeping overnight in wooden cabins suspended in trees high above the ground. She was scared, brave, thrilled, worried. When we spoke she told me that she had been bitten by a stray dog midway through her travels. The bite didn’t break the skin on her leg, no blood was drawn. But a small pull in the back of her mind led her to insist on getting a rabies shot anyway. Just in case. The not knowing was too much.
The weight of this story was not in the event of the bite itself but in the hours that followed, when she didn’t know what she should do about it. What if’s had begun to spread like tendrils, a kind of map of congested railways running in all directions. She put a stop to the voice in her head that warned of her impending mortality and resolved to go to the hospital. Decisiveness rewarded her with the absolute and almost immediate elimination of doubt. My friend felt herself regaining power and control over the possibilities of her body’s natural fragility. All was well again. That was around the same time a new contagious virus was spreading in Wuhan, China. The city went into lockdown that day.
The pandemic robbed us of the ability to inoculate our fears. Until everyone has access to a vaccine, we will continue to experience varying degrees of danger and instability. When the pandemic first began to unfold, before we knew the extent of what would occur, the same close friend of mine asked how I felt. I remember saying, “It feels like the world caught up to where I am.” I had just narrowly broken out of a turbulent two year relationship, lost a dear cousin, and my dog. The amount of calamity and pain in my life at that time was palpable. We related that it felt like the world stopped for a second. Held its breath. Grieved with us.
Our fears know how to spread, warp, judge. They are contagious by nature, and in the pandemic they’ve become even more adept at making us question ourselves at our core. In trying to keep up with my own fears, or rather, in trying to keep them from spilling out, I think I kept them alive. They thrived on my ability to ignore them, to build insular environments around them. Similar to the methods of emotional and psychological abuse that I thought I’d eradicated and escaped, invisible and untraceable threats tend to be the most menacing. And the most reluctant to leave you.
I haven’t been home in what feels like a long time. Two years. The clocks in my family’s house have moved. There’s a grandfather clock and sewing machine in my unoccupied bedroom because people I love have passed away this year, and my family has nowhere else to put their belongings. Rearranged furniture always startled me when I was a child. Why did Dad move the couch to the other side of the room? Is it because it got too cold next to the window? As vague and meaningless as the changes might have been then, I can’t ignore how significant these subtle adjustments felt to me. Even more so now that death has attached itself to the movement of inanimate objects inside my family’s home.
The last 12 months spent in my apartment either by myself or with my roommate(s) has proven how little I can change, or move. My bedroom is incredibly narrow, cozy to a fault. I cannot move my desk to another part of the room because there isn’t another part of the room. Mornings are filled with sunlight and hope, and evenings with a sense of foreboding because the windows get dark and I can’t see outside of them. Adults get sucked into strange beliefs like: if you can’t see it, it’s likely not there. Such is the emotional embodiment of physical limitation. Existing solely inside tricks you into believing you’re immune to good things, like imagination or possibilities.
Instead, other windows open in response: Instagram feeds. Old photos of past loves. Bottles of wine from the conbini, (convenient store). Escapes outside into repetitive, circular neighborhood walks. Over-familiarized parks, ones I know I should feel grateful for, and do. I didn’t ride a train for seven months. “Tokyo is safe.” People said. The spiral of guilt that follows after allowing yourself to believe it, even if it was just for a moment. I left very few coping vices unturned. Then returned to the solace and silence of my narrow bedroom that I can’t see out of at night.
Only my grandmother disagreed that I planted the soles of my feet to the ground here in Tokyo to weather out the pandemic storm. “She should come back.” She kept saying. It’s a fierce kind of tragedy to not have listened to her then. I don’t think she understood why I was here to begin with, in a country so far away from my family. She passed away in September, just six months ago, before I could send her mail from Japan letting her know how much I missed her. A box addressed to her still sits in my room.
Without much pause, her house was soon emptied of her belongings, then sold. It’s inhumane, how quickly we must take care of the things they leave behind. Sometimes I see stories about people going home to see their loved ones before they passed. It’s a reminder that I didn’t. Couldn’t. The reality at home is sharper. Crueler. Remnants of her absence everywhere, like her clock in my bedroom.
Before the pandemic took hold, my friend was somewhere in Thailand at the beginning of February. She expressed that she was experiencing days as days instead of as counters we use to calculate the passing of time. One of these days was her birthday. She was on a beach by herself, reading a novel she had picked up, when she realized she had turned 30 without knowing it. Unceremoniously 30. No balloons or resolutions, candles or looming expectations of what she should do or become. The day came and went regardless of her accomplishments, and nobody cared who she was.
The feeling she described above all else was relief.
Relief that she no longer had to be in a decade that wrung her dry, she was released from years that had stretched themselves thin. For the first time in a long time everything felt arbitrary, even the things that mattered.
I wonder if 30 will pass through me like that. Or if it will come the way 29 did, navigating leftover trauma from the years before, and carrying some hope for a new beginning. March birthdays have always felt like tripping into Spring. It’s a transition month at home in New Hampshire. Birds start to sing, ice begins to melt and water drips from tree branches. The driveway to my house gets harder to shovel because the snow gets wet and heavy. My grandma used to change the type of glass birds on display in her window every season. Winter birds to spring birds. There is no bearing of how old I was when she did this. I was three, 15, 27. Age lacks depth compared to this timeless memory of her.
