I am preoccupied with the way confessions slip through speech. Each utterance must pass through a prism of personhood, refracted by memory, desire, restraint.
I have always wrangled with my inflections, attempting to sculpt my tone into something sharper, louder, more aligned with a sense of self I was still learning to inhabit. For some, our voice must cross considerable hurdles before it is heard.
*
For most of my life, I had the sensation that people around me were tuned into a frequency I couldn’t hear. Externalising my identity has always seemed a grave feat, and communication often felt like translation. I am made for a more nebulous existence—drifting through the cosmos, or trailing the darkest crevice of the sea.
Feeling out of place in the speaking realm, I started to write at a young age. This was a medium which awarded each word the weight and consideration I felt they deserved. On paper, I was deafening.
Though I gradually grew beyond the intensity of my adolescent insecurities, I am still withdrawn.
*
In the lead-up to my first time travelling by myself, it wasn’t a week alone in Kyoto that unsettled me, but the prospect of joining a group of strangers for a month-long writer’s workshop in Tokyo.
I’d reached a kind of stalemate in Sydney, honed by years of growth yet still unable to sever my ties with self-hatred. I craved a brief disappearance.
Travel, often championed by aimless twenty-somethings as the sacred rite of ‘finding yourself’, promised exactly that.
But I came to understand that this notion rests on a flawed assumption—that there even exists a complete and idealized version of myself. In reality, ‘finding yourself’ actually requires you to stop thinking about yourself so much. In truth it demands more sincerity than I expected.
Underpinning the desire to write is the plea to be heard. Living with a group of writers taught me that this compulsion, which so often feels solitary and all-consuming, is deeply shared.
Though connected by this common thread, each of us arrived bearing the weight of our own separate lives. Laid bare before the wonderful myriad of human identity, I saw that in my difference I was actually no different at all. Some cast themselves widely, with ease. Others carry a more gentle presence. There is no correct way of being.
*
I did not uncover any hidden truth within myself during my time in Tokyo; instead I discovered that I could arrive as I already was.
What surprised me was how easy it felt. The simple act of brushing our teeth together, still groggy from sleep, quickly gave way to comfort.
I’ll start with a series of vignettes, etched into my memory, looping in snippets like old film.
T, all long limbs and loose brown hair, dancing with strangers in the middle of Ueno Park. It’s fitting to find him here, moving with the physical grace of someone proud to be observed. I wish I carried myself like that, restless with curiosity and receptive to the absurd. A true flâneur, I could listen to his life story for hours.
There’s the day M first asks me to walk with her, and I freeze a little, hesitate, only because I admire her. The unfamiliar city unfolds around us as we share fragments of larger significance—the way you drip-feed stories when you’re only just beginning to reveal yourself to someone. I quickly realize how similar we are and begin to imagine a life stretching a little closer to hers. Who would I be if I moved to Melbourne, studied abroad, wrote more?
Then, the warmth of L, the way I lean into him with ease. We’re slipping out of an izakaya one night, our laughter soaked in lemon sours. The old woman who’d served us, noticing his Pokémon socks, stops to hand him a small Pikachu figurine—a gesture so perfectly aligned with the way the world seems to bend around his joy. I’m surprised when he admits he isn’t a particularly positive person, and am reminded that kindness is a conscious choice.
One day in class, N tells us that she’s noticed her camera roll has become crowded with bittersweet reminders: a restaurant that accommodates someone’s dietary need, a store catering to a niche interest, the screenshot of Ukon no Chikara she sent me the night we decided to miss the last train and stay up till dawn.
This trip will forever be marked by the people I spent it with. Thinking of the paths that brought us together and the future that continues to unspool, I see intersecting lines meeting for a brief, luminous point of contact. We continue to span outwards in all directions, hurtling towards new possibilities.
*
My daily journal entries consist of simple snapshots and fleeting impressions. The intense introspection which usually fills my pages back home is notably absent. At first, this troubles me. Hadn’t I come here to write?
I try to lace daily encounters with lyricism, but words fall short, unable to capture the full extent of my awe. S reassures me: perhaps the sketch, raw and unadorned, is enough. Not everything needs to be unraveled or explained. The beauty of these moments is bound to their brevity.
I feel this way about my entire experience here. I don’t think I’ll ever find the right words to describe the love which radiated from our guesthouse, or the feeling of lightness in my chest.
*
Last year, I penned a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy:
You only have to give it time.
One day you will rise and cross into
the realm where everything has
a solid, conceivable form.
It is difficult to hold that thought,
brick-heavy in your chest
against an unrelenting procession
of wind, rainfall, light, dark.
In the slow turning of it all
even splinters catch
slivers of the sun.
Maybe I’ll always remain in flux. I am constantly taunted by an amorphous ‘more’. But I am not lost, and I already know who I am.
Slowly, shame begins to lift from my body because I have been shown it is possible.
*
I wander through Shinjuku Gyoen, retracing my path from seven years prior when I’d first come here with my grandmother. Walking here alone for a second time, I am full of nothing but empathy for the girl who was afraid of the world and herself. I’d never have believed who I would become.
A few days later, while visiting an empty shrine, I Google Translate a wish written on an ema. It reads: Stay healthy and laugh forever I hope. I am touched by the simplicity of the request, and think of this phrase often as my departure date rolls painstakingly closer.
It is unfair for me to cast Japan as the site of my becoming. It has held me as much as it has rejected me. In its eyes I am just another obtuse tourist shooting through Shinjuku on a go-kart. For a moment, though, here in Tokyo, my voice does not quiver when I speak.
Maybe authentic selfhood is really only found in the place you already occupy in your body, in the periphery of the people you love. Despite the messaging we receive every single day, identity is not a grand project you can sculpt to perfection.
Sometimes, to find yourself all you really need to do is walk down a different side of the street than you usually do. And now, back home, I remind myself to do that every single day.