My Life-Changing Journey to Japan
How the Thought “I Need a Life Change” Started it All
”The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.”
— Maya Angelou
I was reading a book and found this quote.
It reminds me of the way I changed my life 5 years ago. By August 2017, I had just turned thirty.
I knew I needed a life change. I was over it.
My life the way it was had to end,
it had been too long in the cramped apartment and relationship and life. Even my writing business failed to nourish me anymore, not in the space it was.
I had been doing the same things, building my business, and studying for my Masters for years.
Life was stale.
My soul felt confined and needed to stretch out.
“The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.” The question was how?
The Vision
I told all my friends about this feeling.
“I need a life change,” is what I kept saying, on repeat.
In response, my friend suggested I travel.
She told me about her journey to live in Japan and how transformative it was.
Suddenly I saw it. I got the vision.
A tiny orchestra of violins began playing in my heart. I felt a shift and I knew. I knew I had to go to Japan. Not to visit but to live for a year at least.
And it was weird. It seemed random. It was a big change.
I really freaked out a bunch of my friends.
One suggested this was my version of a “breakup haircut,” because it came out of nowhere…
but I knew this was something more that it wasn’t really random.
“The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.”
This journey to Japan was the road being bulldozed.
The journey to Japan was meant for me. This path was for me and I had to go.
The universe was calling my ticket. It was the choice to step forward and claim what it had waiting for me, or miss out.
The clock was ticking.
I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew it was time.
Complications
The story of how I actually got to live in Japan is a complicated yarn. It took time — two years. But obstacle by obstacle I got through it.
One of the hardest things was leaving a relationship of 7 years in the process.
I had been in denial that things were not working out. Once I made the move to end the relationship, it took time to get over.
I spent time grieving it, and I started dating new people but I didn’t find anything that gave me the content and safe feeling of that relationship.
Obviously…I was about to move away! Not the idle scenario.
So it felt like I was doing everything alone.
And that was a new feeling.
It was the first time in almost a decade that I didn’t have someone to come home to like I did with my ex.
I had friends but here I was:
- pulling up all my roots,
- getting ready to move far away from them,
- going into a timezone where I’d be awake when everyone in America was asleep.
I was feeling my loneliness and on the verge of becoming more alone than ever.
But my vision was so clear.
I knew 100% that this path was for me.
That gave me strength, resilience, and determination to get through everything.
Arriving
Almost 2 years after I got the vision to go to Japan, I found myself touching down in Tokyo in the summer of 2019.
Eventually, I rolled my suitcases through the roads of Osaka and ended up living in Wakayama, a less populated district full of mountains.
Living there was full of challenges as well.
The day job
To get a visa, I had to have a day job. Mine paid beans and was full of issues.
I would get phone calls from the higher-ups at my job with a laundry list of anonymous complaints from coworkers.
And no matter what I did, there were always more complaints.
It was a cultural difference in how feedback was delivered so it wasn’t intended to be mean-spirited…
but it did not work for me.
I felt highly triggered and oppressed by the job.
But the job and my apartment were connected — if I lost the job, I’d be homeless.
At one point I was so unhappy with the drama at work that I contemplated leaving Japan early.
I felt like someone else in my shoes would give up in a heartbeat.
In fact, the person in the position before me had left early…and I had to wonder if all this stuff was the reason why.
Juggling my business
Another issue was that my business was more difficult to conduct because of that job as well as the timezone.
But I had to try.
To do that, I had to conduct client meetings at 6 AM my time, or as late as 10 PM.
Plus work a day job.
But I did it! And it kept my writing and consulting business alive — at least a little bit! Enough to pay some of those bills.
I lived in the middle of nowhere
I lived in the countryside a long train ride from the center of Osaka.
There were mountains and farmland all around me.
No one around me spoke English.
The sense of loneliness was so intense.
As people would find out through COVID, isolation is not good for mental health and it can cause you to relive past traumas.
The peak of COVID wouldn’t start for a few more months, but I was already living that dark reality early.
With the isolation PLUS the negativity I felt was coming from my coworkers…
I was not in a good place.
I spent 10 years being emotionally abused as a kid, so believe me, revisiting that sort of trauma all by myself was not fun.
Not fun at all.
But on my dark night, I still felt like there was some reason I was in Japan.
So what did I do? I stuck around.
Decisions
Near the tail-end of the time I planned to be in Japan, I began dating my fiance, Andrew.
(I’ll have to tell you the details another day :D )
The cool thing is:
It turns out this special man arrived in Japan the very same month my urge to travel there began playing its orchestral tune…
We began as a couple at New Year's at the beginning of 2020!
But what a year it was.
Somehow, he wasn’t fazed by the fact that this love affair was doomed to end.
He knew I planned to leave Japan in March.
But then COVID happened.
In the height of COVID in March 2020, when I was originally supposed to get on a plane to Italy, suddenly everything changed.
All my flights were canceled.
I had loved ones scared I would get stuck in Japan if I didn’t jump on a plane to the USA ASAP.
I freaked out, as well, so I got rid of everything that wouldn’t fit into a suitcase within a 48-hour period…
Hold on.
As I was about to buy a flight out of the country, my intuition gave me pause once again.
My intuition told me there was more Japan had to teach me.
So….
instead of hopping on a plane to “weather out COVID” with family,
I moved in with Andrew.
We’d only been dating a couple of months at the time, but this man ended up being my fiance.
It was tough re: COVID and the anxieties, but in the end, living together was awesome.
We rode bicycles next to the rice paddies as the weather warmed up. I was done working my horrible job. He worked remotely.
I can’t remember a happier time in my life.
But the only thing is that we still had a ticking clock looming over us…
My visa expiration date
By the time my visa was set to expire in July, I knew this relationship was too good to pass up.
I had to leave Japan but I couldn’t end the relationship so we entered a new and more difficult chapter.
The 6 months of long-distance we ended up having to endure were so hard.
Japan had closed its borders to visitors due to COVID with no reopening date on the schedule.
We literally did not know when we were going to see each other again.
(By the way, had we waited for Japan to change their policies, we would have had to wait years for me to be officially allowed in. Or my fiance would have had to leave his job and apartment behind to visit me in the USA and risk not being able to return to it.)
Finally, I beat the odds and was able to reunite with him in Japan on Christmas Eve, 2020 without a visa.
(How? The details are in a story you can read here.)
Plot twist
Reuniting in Japan was awesome but I only had 3 months given to me before I would have had to leave again. Early in 2021 to avoid any more visa issues, we moved together to the USA to have a life together.
My fiance got a new dream job there in a city new to both of us.
We overcame the struggle to be in the same location, and we thought we were ready to live happily after.
But then something else happened.
My father suddenly died.
Someone might expect me to regret my travels since I lost my dad so soon after, but I don’t.
My dad was so supportive — I get my travel bug from him — and he was proud to see me do it.
The trip actually brought us closer.
Before the trip, we had more reason to savor time together since I was about to go away.
During the trip, we video-called weekly.
And he was the first person I saw when I came back.
Even though I spent a year farther away from him geographically,
initiating my journey to Japan in 2017 gave my Dad and me more time together, with more emotional closeness than I’ve ever had with him in my adult life.
It was all around a blessing.
And thank goodness I went to Japan, met my fiance, and brought him back,
because through the emotional pain and loss, Andrew was there to hold me through it.
My life My business Everything is so different now
And even though there has been so much sadness this past year grieving my dad, my life now is full of joy, too.
I can honestly say that I love my life!
I am very lucky.
I’m so grateful I listened to myself and embraced the need for change.
It was not easy.
I had to escape my own comfort zone, and I had to battle so many obstacles, but I wouldn’t change that journey for the world.
I grew so much and I gained so much from it.
Is it your turn?
- Is this the time for you to embrace the journey that awaits you?
- Do you feel the change brewing?
- Is it time to escape your comfort zone?
My advice:
💚 Accept it.
If you feel the need for change bulldozing a path in your mind, the first step is to accept it and admit this is the truth.
💚 You don’t have to understand why.
Know that even if things look alright in your life, if you feel like you have no logical reason to desire something else, that is no reason to deny it when you need a change.
Later on, you will look back and see why it was necessary. But you don’t need to understand it now.
💚 You don’t need to know how yet.
Keep sitting in the question. Maybe even tell your friends. You are going to get the answer, I just know it.
💚 Know that you don’t have to do this alone.
Trust that people will come into your life to offer help.
Also, if you lead the way, anyone in your life who may have been skeptical will come to understand, or at least respect, your decisions. (Or not, but you gotta do what you gotta do).
💚 You are the one that has to make the decision.
If the path is meant for you, claim it.
No one else will!
This task is just for you.
If you feel a tiny orchestra of violins calling on a symphony of change, embrace it.
There are good things ahead.
Thanks for reading!
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