Something in December really knocked me down, and I was pretty depressed about it. Luckily I went back to my parents’ place in Osaka for New Year’s, and from there through mid-January my thoughts gradually came together.
My personality is such that I can’t help but overthink things, build up anxiety inside myself, and eventually hit a breaking point. This time too, the anxiety gradually built up, but I’ve gotten better at understanding my own personality, and I was able to patiently chew through it internally.
Let me walk through this step by step and sort out how the anxiety built up.
What happened last year
To sum up last year: it was my second year living at a place called Iikane Palette. While relying on a workshop space called vivistop hakata, I was in a hurry to get community-building going in a more serious way.
I wanted to start planting the seeds of what I wanted to do as soon as possible. Otherwise, wouldn’t I not have enough time to prepare for what I actually wanted to do?
But somewhere in my heart, I was also resisting settling on what I wanted to do too early and devoting myself to it. Rushing to launch my own community and locking in exactly how I’d operate on a regular basis felt somehow stifling to me.
Caught in that contradiction, I vaguely leaned toward just trying things — taking on as many opportunities as came my way through connections, and doing my own kind of activities as I went.
Setback
And then, December.
I took on a certain project from someone in the local area I’d been introduced to. But a project I’d assumed wouldn’t be all that difficult ended up completely beating me, and it fell apart. When I calmly looked back on the results with the person who’d introduced me, we agreed: it was a project that could have been done if handled carefully.
But from that point, the contradiction that had been sitting inside me kept growing bigger and bigger, and I felt this heaviness in my heart building up, to the point where I wanted to cry.
It wasn’t a matter of being incapable at work — that wasn’t the issue at all — but I dragged around this heavy, helpless feeling through the end of the year and into New Year’s.
Writing it down in a notebook, bit by bit
At times like this, I fall back on something I picked up during the lonely days of the pandemic in Tokyo: just write it down in a notebook. I also had people outside my current community listen to me talk about it, little by little.
From there, things gradually became clear.
Last year, as it stood, was a year where I tried to do anything that might help make society better and reduce loneliness in the world. While holding down my main job, I boldly took on opportunities from acquaintances where I live and from colleagues.
That part of it, honestly, was admirable. I want to give myself credit for it.
Failing that one project in December made it clear to me that I hadn’t built anything close to the kind of system needed to actually tackle the problems I wanted to take on, and that I’d just kept piling on more and more problems I wanted to address.
When I took on that project, I’d thought that taking on local work would let me do activities that could make society better, starting from the area where I live now.
But I was made to realize that, while I was actually working the project, what I was doing wasn’t remotely the kind of action that would produce results for it.
I’d figured I could pull it off if I just brought my technical skills to bear, and worked it in around my main job and volunteer activities.
But the project partly included work that wasn’t suited to me (consulting), so in the time outside my main job, I wasn’t able to handle it nearly as well as I’d believed at the time.
I did want to contribute, and I think it was a project I could have handled if I’d properly taken the time to do it carefully.
But my own setup — taking on lots of things I figured I could probably do, and taking on projects that included tasks I wasn’t quite suited for, all by myself — wasn’t something that could sustainably deepen the work, for me or for the other person.
Writing in my notebook every day and sitting with the heaviness in my heart, this is the problem I came to understand.
The realization
In short, I need to narrow down what I want to do. I’d love to eventually take on bigger activities, but I need to steadily achieve small goals I can actually enjoy along the way.
In the end, it’s an obvious thing. I’ve started to think I might have realized it sooner if I’d been doing this alongside someone else.
But it’s not all bad.
I think that through last year’s many small attempts, I was gradually getting closer to the various problems I want to work on.
I want to work on regional revitalization. I want to reduce the gap in experiences kids have access to. I want to make interesting content. And on top of that: I want to try consulting. I want to try design. I want to try running workshops. Snowballing one on top of another, my goals just kept getting blurrier and blurrier.
From here, I’m going to work on carving out the problems I actually want to achieve something on, and matching them up with the parts I can enjoy and the parts I can actually handle.
I want to face social good in my own way
So, mulling it over bit by bit, the phrase “how do you give someone’s individuality a social dimension” has settled firmly into place inside me.
It’s the kind of phrase that stays solid no matter how much I turn it over in my hands.
For example, I love a piece of content called Hebocon so much that I ended up hosting it myself. It’s content where you can enter a robot contest even without any technical skill — and what I love is how each robot ends up soaked in the personality of the person who made it.
Events and designs like this have always caught my attention. In particular, I love designs where someone’s weakness — being simply weak, or conversely being so strong they get deemed unnecessary by society — gets woven skillfully into society.
I’ve come to think that digging deeper into that is what my activities going forward should be about.
Going forward
Without rushing at all, I want to focus first on skillfully weaving my own weaknesses and strengths into society, with help from other people along the way.
I’ve been pushing myself hard, trying not to have regrets, imagining that I might die tomorrow — but I think I’m going to let go of that.
I have no idea whether I’ll die tomorrow. If that happens, I’ll just accept it fully. That this was simply the timing.
This year, I don’t think I’ll force myself to put activities out into the world. I’ll only offer a little help with technical or design work to people I already have a relationship with. I’ll focus purely on sorting out my own mind, so I can properly rescue the anxiety inside me.
May the world’s loneliness shrink, even just a little.