Freedom and Accomplishment

Freedom and Accomplishment are two words that come to my mind when I think about how I feel, just moved to Hawaii from Japan, just turned 43 years old.  I came to live in Honolulu for the first time at age 17. I graduated high school early and decided that I would enroll in a semester of college classes at UH for fun.  It was over 25 years ago, the first time leaving home away from home. For me, though, I was more than a latchkey kid, I was a kid who practically raised myself because my single mother didn’t have the resources to be there for me emotionally and support two other children.  So, leaving home for the first time was not as big of a deal for me as it was for others my age. I was already pretty independent for my age. This was just an accelerated change of setting. The next time I would come back here was at the age of 22 when I was transitioning from being a topless dancer from the first strip club I’d been fired from to an all nude club in Honolulu where I’d dance naked for the first time.  I think I probably lived and worked in town for a month or two before returning back to California. When I was 30, I went to the Big Island on a spring break from full time teaching. I went there to go to a forest rave, found a lover to coop up with, and got my whole right arm tattooed with brilliant and flowery Japanese and Hawaiian designs to mark “the blossoming” of my 30s. I remember at that time land on the big island was really cheap and I was thinking about buying a plot of land to build a cabin on and retire.  I remember making a promise to Hawaii one of these times while looking out at the beautiful deep and blue Pacific Ocean. “I will come back to Hawaii to live after I’ve lived my life more.” I remember the vision I had for my big island goddess future– to own some land with my own house and ride a horse to the store topless. I imagine always having a place to return home to in Hawaii. And I have always felt at home in Hawaii.

Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve felt relieved and celebratory and so very grateful that I made the leap to move here when I did.  I suppose a part of me didn’t think I was ready to leave Japan because I wasn’t fluent yet and there was far more suffering that needed to be had before I could really appreciate the liberation that is felt in the air and general attitude of the people here.  Appearances don’t matter as much. It’s sunny every single day. Weed is easy to get, cheap and delivered to your door. I can continue improving Japanese here, in fact Japanese jobs are going to be more forgiving than Japan I’m sure.  There is no shortage of Japanese clients, customers and comfort items available right in my neighborhood, and Japanese food and what I’ve been cooking for 3 years is comforting to me still.  As I look upon the ocean as a 43 year old with so much more experience and wisdom and pain than I had at 17 or 22 and I am extremely proud of the life that I’ve lived.  Mainly because I could look at the vast blue sea and know that I’d crossed it several times to brave new waters again and again and come out a better persona as a result. It was extremely difficult to move to Japan from Los Angeles and I was terrified. But once I make moves, the Universe always always steps in to give me a soft landing. I guess I feel like I have to deserve to be here. It is never without ups and downs and tests along the way, challenges have already shown itself in the month that I have been here.  I have great hopes for the future and the view from my balcony is the best view that I’ve had in almost a decade. Why waste my time feeling old. I feel the same. I do my best. That’s all.

 

Hello Hawaii, Hello Next Life

I had the aching to take 3 steps forward today and bought my roundtrip ticket from Tokyo to Honolulu on May 8th returning back to Japan by November, just in time to prepare for the solo exhibition that I will be doing if everything goes perfectly in my favor. I applied to do a visual and performance show in Tokyo, to a paid residency using all my new photomedia art. I am so excited to be working hard on my artwork once again. It’s actually been five long years of not doing visual art and its hurt me to be away. I’m not singing much or making music right now, but I am making visual art. I’m working on an oiran costume that’s taken me quite some weeks to put together clothing and wig wise. As a result of styling my outfit, I went and bought my very first formal kimono. The oiran performance character can also double as my normal self who wants to wear a kimono. It’s very exciting to have bought my first kimono. The next day I went to a kimoo walk with all these other Hafu Japanese ladies in Asakusa. It was a touristy thing to do, but when all of us were in a 15 person squad of beauty it was hard for people to resist.

I met another fashionista hafu and hung out and shopped all the bargain kimono shops in the area and then drank macha lattes and spoke a mixture of Japanese and English together! It was really fun. I love the hafu community in Japan. Life would be so hard without them. Most of it is online presence with the clubs that I am in, but one of my best friends in town is also hafu. We met in Janauary only recently but have been truly hanging out often and genuinely as friends, which is a feeling that in almost 3 years in Tokyo, I haven’t felt from more than 2 or 3 people. Having deep conversations and thinking critically about things, i’m so glad for her too. She is a true reflection of me. Entrepreneur business woman. Single, no kids. I’m going to Hawaii in search of my life partner because it seems that finding him or her in Japan is way too hard. I truly truly think it can be so much easier elsewhere. Go to the place of least resistance my inner voice pleadas and I release and follow her. The familiar healing beaches of Hawaii. Honolulul at first, to do some interviews and see what my options are. If I can live far away from the city, i’d be happy, but Honolulu was where I lived when I was also in a crucial transformation point in my life. Graducated high school early and moved to Hawaii to go to college classes early with no credit while I waited for UC Berkeley to start. It was so amazing. I’m ready. Right in time for my 43rd bday. As I was prepping to turn 40, full of fear and tears and inadequate feelings I landed in Tokyo. And now, May 8th, i prepare to leave in as big a way as I came, mot finally and not forever but ever so ready to venture to a new open heart location, where the goddess laughs and sings and swims in the ocean blue. (with very little clothes on, in any body shape she chooses).

Avoid and Detach

October is here and I am feeling that my mood is dropping with my income.  It’s been a year since I have gotten sick which is a great thing considering it is going to be medical mask season in Japan in no time.  I’ve been spending time looking for jobs in Hawaii and in greater Japan to see what the future holds. The more I think about being a Tantra goddess in Hawaii and smoking weed everyday, the more my mouth waters with excitement.  I deserve to be joyful at least. I was in a short relationship recently but now it is over after about 3 weeks. I have the tendency to attract avoidant detachers, and learning about this particular relationship theory really has saved me from a lot of pain and hurt in the recent past.  My last love affair with an avoidant in Okinawa ended also abruptly as it had started and it hurt a lot more than this one but in the wake of it I researched this particular set of relationship theories and was able to see a great long pattern of this that started in high school and I actually could feel myself heal. From the age of 15 to 40, I blamed myself for them abandoning ship and it devastated me for long periods that long outlasted the short period of time that they were ever able to spend with me which varied from a week to a month or two at most.  This last guy told me “well, you want to get married and have kids” so that just blah blah blah, I don’t even know what he said after that because I focused on the former sentence. He read my blog posts and determined that I wasn’t a good partner for him because I dared to want a family. I think my other Special Dismissive Detacher Head ex boyfriend also would say things like that to me “you want a Disney relationship”, making the fact that I wanted a child or marriage a negative thing.  While I agree that Disney in many ways is a problematic ideal, the idea of a Disney type of LOVE union is no different than other tales of pair bonding: Shakti and Shiva, Romeo and Juliet, JayZ and Beyonce etc and the idea of wanting that to be made out to be something wrong is what is wrong actually.   The Disney ideal to him also referred to monogamy and marriage, which that ex was firmly against.   I believe it can be a terrible negative to these types of attachers. It has occurred to me a year or so ago that if I actually wanted to ever make the dream of being a mother come true, I need to move out of Japan, I’m fairly convinced the baby daddy does not exist on this island.  An English student of mine who is the same age as me just had a miscarriage and that also hit me like a reality bomb. I’m probably not going to have kids, Am I Universe?  I’m just going to entertain them part time as a nursery school teacher at best?  Is this my fate?  My recent student is married and stable but the same age as me: 42.  Having kids is not something that I dedicated enough of my life making happen even up until now.  It has always just been an idea  mainly because I am MOSTLY SINGLE!  Therefore “making kids” is not something i could have practically dedicated my life to unless it was through intentional random pairing (I know a single mother who did this long ago) or the unconventional fertilization route (which, one of my friends who is a single mother pursued for more than five years from age 35-42).  I guess I am too scared to be a single mother having been raised single and also been so economically unbalanced just taking care of myself.  My two chosen daughters are also single mothers in their twenties and it doesn’t seem like a life I want badly enough to dedicate so much effort to be actually.  If any model I dreamed of, it wasn’t Disney, it was JayZ and Beyonce, working as a power couple (or their media projected images of family) and parental team.  I proposed it to my two gay bff couple, who have been a pair for over 7 years and they rejected the queer family idea almost 5 years ago.  They still seem to be living with just enough to enjoy weekends income, not yet married, no assets and taking care of their families with their middle class incomes which means, no desire to make room for a baby.  I haven’t even committed to having a dog, even that I lived in the same place for 11 years. My income was always unstable, even then. It seems that I made it all the way across the ocean only to replicate the same pattern that I lived in in a totally different career in LA.  Prostitute-Victim-Rescuer Triangle (this is a DEEP one that I want to dedicate a whole post on later) . Oh, wait, I never saw myself as a victim even tough I was, or was I, or am I? Or are we ALL one breath away from a change in our status.   Oh, wait, I’m an English teacher now which is the same as being a college student counting change and eating convenience store food to save money. That feeling I experienced when I could actually feel myself healing needs to happen with my money story.  I feel like I am teaching my ass off and going to interviews weekly like they are another job. There is no rest for the normal worker, this which I swore I would never be again when I quit teaching the first time. I am working hard to sow my resources using all the skills that I have and always spending my free time to search for better ways, yet change is very slow and sometimes I even fear not having enough change to get to my next job site on the train because the train fee is so expensive.  The thought of staying in Tokyo living this same life for another two years is too damn depressing because I believe that change will not come because Japanese culture and society has yet to change in many ways that I believe are basic human needs.  It feels like a marriage that I am trying to make work even though I know that it already isn’t. I truly believe I could make Japan work better from afar than from within. Maybe this is wishful thinking because I can’t seem to make it work from within. Some relationships just cannot work no matter what.  This is what we have to learn to accept and release. I found, just like with my last lover that it was easy to leave something that wasn’t working. He actually abandoned me, stuffed all my CDs (that he had wonderfully uploaded and ripped to digital for me) in my mailbox and left a long winded 6” goodbye message via messenger but I was still able to go on with my weekend without any tears which is an enormous sign of growth I think.  AVOIDANT DETACHERS ARE GOING TO DETACH SOON REGARDLESS OF HOW YOU LOVE, HOW YOU FUCK, WHAT YOU SAY OR DON’T SAY.  This is the lesson.  It doesn’t have to do with me and there is nothing I can do to stop it.   I learned this JUST LAST YEAR.  I used to meet a guy at Burningman well into my thirties, spend the night with him and be devastated because he didn’t want to continue hanging out with me in love for the week or even pursue a relationship after the playa.  It is possible.  The Special Detacher ex found the love of his life as his rideshare passenger for Burningman, so don’t say it’s not possible.  It literally took me years to let go when others wanted to let go.  Not saying that I have this skill perfected at all, but in understanding that a pattern in humanity exists, not just a pattern in my own faulty design or inabilities,  I have noticed a new dawn.