misterdaddylonglegs

[misterdaddylonglegs]

I spent 37 days in osaka, with 28 of them spent refining my japanese speaking abilities. I wish I could say I came out of the kokusai koryu centre fluent, spending the last 9 days of my trip effortlessly flirting with married housewives in shithouse bars along dotonbori, but instead I left feeling lonely and unsure about myself. My main dilemma was a central tenet of my identity was tested; that I can get along with anyone and make friends anywhere.

It seems that this was not the case. I struggled to make friends with the 20 or so other people partaking in the winter intensive course and I rationalised this as a mismatch of personality. That these freakish type-a dorks didn't take up any of my offers to go bar hopping through kishiwada because they were boring and I was literally too much fun that it might kill them. Whilst I was sucking down premium malt lagers they were doing group excursions to the local supermarket. In my drunken musings I thought about how lame they were whilst I, the effortlessly cool guy was trying to explain basketball shoes live from the queen elizabeth hall to the deeply uninterested bartender.

After around 200ish beers and discussions with some of my inner circle back home in Melbourne I realised my perspective was skewed. It was hard for me to admit to myself I've spent $3000 to go overseas and do uni for 8 hours a day just to have no friends, but it was even harder to admit that maybe the other 19 people who so effortlessly formed their own cliques and posses were not the problem but rather I was. After this realisation I stopped focusing so much on how the others thought of me. I stopped trying to show how cool I was by coming in every morning to class with a bottle of water and a can of coffee to soothe my hangover. I stopped clicking my tongue in the cafeteria hall when I heard plans of walking to the beach and skipping stones at night. I put my walls down and instead of dismissing the very basic functions of human friendship as being cringe normie shit, I spent time actually getting to know the people in my course.

3 weeks in I had managed to worm my way into the inner circle. Bike rides and dorm room drinks and nights out in izumi sano followed. I was pretty happy with myself, I managed to do what shinji couldn't (in EoE) I tore my walls down and let myself be known. But as the term finished and we all went our separate ways I couldn't change that niggling feeling of self doubt. That I couldn't fit in and I was to be once again thrown outside of the inner ring to grapple with my loneliness. Because of this irrational worry and my own defensive personality, every day I scrolled through peoples instagram stories watching them have fun together and sunk into my old habit of izakaya's and embarrassingly poor quality japanese conversation. I would be lying if I said it wasn't fun, but it wasn't all too fulfilling either and I would stumble home, feeling an incel like disappointment I couldn't connect deeply with anyone.

Coming home from the trip with 24 hours of transit I had a lot of time to think back about what I'd just experienced. I realised that the only real thing stopping me from connecting with others deeply is my own self doubt, and my bad habit of pigeon-holing others to protect my ego. Whilst my main goal was to become a super fluent MattVsJapan like freak, I think understanding myself at a deeper level and understanding my own anxieties of being loved is not a bad consolation prize.