I’ve never been one to revist the past out of nostagia. I want to live in the moment and so I am always doing whatever I can to enjoy my present life and make a better future without harping too much on one side of the time-space continuum or the other.
If anything most of my exploration of the past is purely for creating context to say something I want to say in an article or in what you could call “shadow work”, trying to untangle and integrate the dark corners of my world with the light.
I often go back to how hard school was for me and how music saved me because that shaped a lot of who I am today, and I want to understand all the nuances and what old feelings linger that I can clean up.
But for the most part, when something is done, I cut it out of my focus. It only exists as a backstory, as context. I don’t ever want to live in the past when I have the present. And more importantly, I don’t ever want to stop growing.
In some ways I’m quite extreme. I left my hometown at 18 and never really went back for more than a month after my second year of university. Even most holidays I stayed at school.
There was just so much more to explore in the city and so many more people to meet. In my last year of univeristy I moved in with a female friend. Some people thought it was strange and others thought it was totally normal. Many people asked if we’d get together but she was like a little sister to me.
Our shared interests made living together the most natural thing in the world. We both loved trying new things, especially things from places we had never been.
We’d go to the Japanese market 2-3 times a month and each time we’d try a new dish. We’d get Cantonese dim sum just as often. Once a week we’d go to a new restaruant from a country we didn’t know much about. I had my first Malaysian food with her, my first Polish food, my first Indian food.
We went to a music video festival to watch music videos from around the world. Japan had it’s own day, which further led me down the path towards living there. Her mother was Japanese, or at least her background was, though she could hardly speak the language, being third generation herself.
I had already started studying Japanese (as well as French and a short attempt at Arabic), and we’d dig deep into the culture together, trying to stay outside of anime and manga which is great but always a bit heavily represented.
Meanwhile, I had a group of friends who were at the center of the local music scene and the city attracted every conceivable indie band a few months before SXSW. Most bands made their touring schedule around that event and all past through in around Septmber or November. So in the fall it was national acts and during the rest of the year I’d go see friends bands or local bands like Apollo Sunshine, one of the most underated bands of the 2000’s.
I had two good friends from high school in my city and both had their group of friends too that they introduced me to. My first summer I wanted to remain independent and in a place I wouldn’t need a car. I wanted to try living in a house with many roomates and so I did for two months. The second summer my parents refused to help me pay for it. I decided to stay on friend’s couches instead because I no longer had a my own car in my hometown and there was so little to do there. Couches were not ideal so I decided to get a job my third and fourth year, working in a hotel.
So my visits back home were usually only a week or two, once a year, compared to most of my old friends who spent 2-3 months home per year altogether.
My old friends slowly became more distant. I hardy noticed at first, and it was only after I moved to Japan that I realized how distant we had become. My “best friend” from Middle School unfriended me on social media (he unfriended almost everyone so I never took it personal). Another I had to ask around to find his contact infortmation when I went back home.
My closest group of friends had continued to meet often and I wasn’t there so it started to feel less and less like my group.
None of that bothered me, I was capable of making new friends. It wasn’t that I didn’t cherish my old friends, but I was very much in a shell in high school and so I felt they had never really known me, unlike some new friends.
It was a big world and I was mostly just excited to explore it.
I had intended on staying in Japan for a year or two before exploring another country and another. My plan was to do that for the entirety of my 20’s, but because I was in a relationship and Japanese took much longer than I had hoped to get conversational in, I stayed for 5 years.
Finally a breakup, a natural disaster, the gentrification of my favorite town in the universe and a constantly being given 1 year visas while others got 3 years made me decide to travel again. I spent a good year or two back and forth around East Asia, learning Mandarin and getting out of my comfort zone before getting tired and trying to set up a base in Xiamen.
The City changed so much in so short a time, it gave me flashbacks to how the culture of my neighborhood in Tokyo had gone to shit. I felt like there was no reason to stay anymore and tried to visit a few places while making a plan to come back to Japan.
I wanted to make a base so I could have a home to come back to, because my hometown never felt like home and I had already lost that home feeling in both Shimokitazawa in Tokyo and Xiamen in Southeast China. I wanted a do-over, to try again in Tokyo with all I had learned over the previous 6 years. A lot got in the way, Corona, a compeltely different social landscape due to smartphones and rising prices, and a few other unfortunate events.
So in a way my past is full of both failure and adventure and not much in between.
The failure was unpleasant but it helped me grow. There isn’t much I regret because I don’t see the purpose of dwelling on things.
The adventure was amazing and I would do anything to get it back, anything but throw away the live I am building, and so I can’t get back to it right away.
I have changed my lifestlye more times than I can count and most of the people who knew me at some point knew a very different me.
This is why I don’t often revisit the past. I don’t want to think of now as being hard or a struggle because it’s leading towards something more sustainable long term. At the same time, I don’t have an easy time reminiscing with people because many people haven’t (or can’t) recognized who I am now, they see a me that no longer exists.
Add to that the distance and how I am not able to travel much now. Most people who I would like to reconnect with I can’t see in person, so reconnecting online inevitable has a lot of “let me know if you visit” even though we both know it won’t be this year or next.
Also, anyone who has tried to live in the present moment knows how hard it can be, so I do what I can to make it easy on myself. I focus on this week and this month, if not this very moment.
Lastly, I am an explorer by nature and I truly enjoy finding new things, meeting new people and taking on challenges, more than anything else!
Give me a month to travel and I’ll choose somewhere new and stay put the entire time to dig as deeply as I can into a city or town and discover what it truly has to offer.
But to balance all the so-called shadow work, I’ve finally decided to revisit my past for the sheer enjoyment of it. I’ve changed my taste in music every 3-12 months for the past 20 years, exploring and exploring. I want to try and revisit the past through music as I’ve mentioned before.
In the process I will revisit the context of my life when I heard that music and look for the positive memories. It gives me more to be thankful for and also allows me to see how far I’ve come. It may also give me some new ways to connect with people from my generation.
This week I’ve been listening to Nine Inch Nails, Michael Jackson, Spoon, Justice, Caribou, and Animal Collective to name a few, which bring me back to very different periods in my life.
For the Cross Culture weekly prompt, I will also introduce topics that deal with Nostalgia and past experiences. I think that will be a good way to peek into the lives of people from different cultures and see beyond the surface of what we think of as culture, because our culture isn’t just a set of values and traditions, but how we react andinteract with the world around us.
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My work:
My series of short novels “Confessions of the Damaged” is up on Amazon and Hivelist as an ebook, and Spotify and Apple as an audiobook!
And here are some music videos, all music and editing by …me!
https://youtu.be/fxzjCc1bQz0?si=j3bGhaLyFGo6VR5e
https://youtu.be/Zn96mtavdHo?si=sy74_bqAaHkOfCR4
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