I’ve always thought of happiness as something that comes and goes too easily and quickly. Some of the bad days feel like they will never end, and it also feels like good days will not come again. When the good days would come all I would be thinking about is how they are only temporary. I’ve learned that ups and downs are sort of what life is about. How would I know what a good day is like if I hadn’t ever had a bad day? I’ve come to learn that we cannot always control situations, and how they work out, but we can control how much we let things affect us. Taking a step back and thinking, “Hm…does this thing really have to ruin my day?” can be a simple enough thing, but implementing it into life really can help you stop overthinking and enjoy the possibility of the best day ever!
I actually forgot about blogs. I have been forgetting a lot recently, and I am not really sure why, either. Maybe it’s stress from AP testing or the excitement of summer coming. OMG. Speaking of summer, I just can’t wait any longer. I have so much anticipation. I don’t have any vacations planned, but I will be super busy anyway. I will probably go to some type of amusement park in LA or something. I will probably go shopping a lot too. I really wanted to go on a vacation but now that I am thinking about it I really don’t have any time. I think it will be kind of fun staying home and getting to see friends. I will have time to do things in Ojai I normally wouldn’t do. I think maybe I will emerge myself in the fun aspects of home. Unless my family and I decide to go on a last minute trip I need to make the most of it. It is weird to think I am going into my last year of school here at home. Once I graduate I will live somewhere else. Anyways this whole bridging process is so interesting.
I wonder what people would think of me if I said the words that are always burning through my head. I wonder if my friends would resent me if they knew what I was really thinking. I feel trapped inside my skull and I am always trying to claw my way out. The voice in my head is so loud and powerful that I sleep only to silence it. I feel like I am trapped in my body with my anxiety and depression and ADHD. They scream at me and each other constantly. I hide from them within myself although I can’t get away. I fight them for every word that comes out of my mouth every letter that I write and song I sing. I don’t let them come up to the surface because they are not who I am. I understand that they are no reflection of me, but they live inside my body like another personality. I feel as though they are crawling me towards death and I use all of my strength to hold them back. I fight constantly to stay in the moment.
My favorite part about this summer is going to Italy. Whenever I go there, I feel a sense of peace that I don’t feel anywhere else. I stay at my Italian stepmom’s family house in Puglia and her family is so nice to be around and always makes my trip so enjoyable. One of my favorite things about going there is that I can eat an insane amount of food, and gain no weight. The food there is processed and filled with chemicals like most food in America and whenever I overeat in Italy, I never feel sick. Whenever I come back home, food makes me feel sick for a week because I become used to the food in Italy. I start my mornings in Italy by eating lots of fruit, cake, and cookies for breakfast. I eat an insane amount when I’m there. I probably eat ten meals a day. Typically during the day, we will either go to the beach, swim in the pool or go out to town. The only issue is that it gets so hot over the summer so if I’m not at the beach or pool, I need to stay inside. At night, we occasionally go out to town or go to my stepmoms friends hotel for dinner. I have been to Rome, Puglia, and Bari but this summer will be the first time I’m going to Venice and the Dolomites. My stepmom doesn’t like Venice because it’s just filled with water and there really isn’t much to do, but we are only going there for one night and I’m just happy to see it. The Dolomites will be fun but I know that my dad will make me hike all day in the heat which will be intense.
Finals begin this Friday and I’m terrified. I can’t believe that the school year is coming to an end and I’m not prepared for any of my exams. This semester has felt so intense and finals aren’t necessary. I’m happy where my grades are and don’t want my finals to mess it up. Knowing myself, I probaly won’t spend a long time studying just because I’m already so fed up with school work. My first final is chemistry which is terrifying because I’m horrible at it. Luckily, I have one side of paper to use as a cheat sheet on the test, which will help a lot. I feel confident about my english final because half of it is vocab that I already know and the other half is two essays about a book which we can have during the test. I am terrified for my math final because I have been struggling all year. Once again, I am allowed a full page cheat sheet for math so it will be a lot easier. I’m hoping that my finals go well and don’t make a huge change on my grade.
I only realized last night that I’m truly graduating from school. All this time, it seemed like some kind of joke, and that next year would be just the same as the last. However, at one in the morning on Thursday, I suddenly understood that it wasn’t true and that I would never be a schoolgirl again. This realization shocked me deeply, and I cried until 3 a.m. How did it happen that 12 years of my life flew by so unnoticed? And if these 12 years flew by like one day, does that mean my whole life will pass just as quickly?
In the last two weeks, everything more or less stable in my life over the past few years has ended. The video game I’ve been playing since I was 12 ended. This silly game served as a marker of stability in my chaotic life, and it ended right after my 18th birthday, how ironic, isn’t it? What seemed to be a childish amusement that gave me a sense of comfort for years ended the moment I turned 18. By the way, yes, I’m now 18 years old, and that has also been a factor in my moral decay these last few weeks. I CAN’T ACCEPT THE FACT THAT I AM NOW AN ADULT WHO NO LONGER HAS A FAVORITE TOY AND WHO IS NO LONGER IN SCHOOL. It’s a terrible feeling to know that all the comfort and the circle of acquaintances I’ve created for myself in another country, day by day for years trying to keep everything stable, will soon collapse like a house of cards and I will have to create it all over again. In short, I am frustrated and don’t know what to do about it.
I used the same words as before, relied on the same silly excuses, and stuck to the same topics of conversation that I used a couple of years ago when I was younger and reckless. As usual, I blushed in our dialogue, and felt embarrassed; for some reason, I always feel shy about using the harsh words I normally use in everyday speech with you. Why, I don’t know, just as I don’t know why this hasn’t changed over the years.
We have long been living separate lives far apart, but a thread of something pure and untainted has remained between us over time. I don’t feel grown-up and tired when I talk to you; it’s as if I’m slipping back into the summer of ’22, and as if my worries and cares are gone again. But now, reflecting on our conversation, my head is filled with different questions. Why do I act like a kid when we talk? What do you think of me now? If/when we meet, will we connect the same way as before? Was our connection so easy for me because I simply didn’t know myself or the world? Will I look at you with different eyes after all I’ve gone through? Or maybe everything has stayed the same, and we can easily chat about our past and future again? How will you react to my changes and worldview? How have you changed, what’s going on in your thoughts, what do you feel as you enter a new stage in your life, and what do you think about the life path I’ve chosen?
What I fear most is that we will meet and you will see me as an adult, beautiful and healthy, a successful young woman who has achieved her goals and set new ones, and you will realize that all this cost me a broken heart. Broken not just from your absence, but also from the absence of family, from total and consuming loneliness in a foreign country, from strange people who have spit on my soul, from endless burnouts. I’m afraid that if you see this, then it will become an undeniable fact that I will have to come to terms with. And then the real question arises: was it all worth it?
This might be the most serious blog post I’ve ever written. There are a few things in my life that I always pay attention to. I notice a person’s hair when I’m talking to them, I observe the nature/architecture around me, but what has always caught my attention the most are the circular patterns of life.
Minute by minute, hour by hour, day turns into night and night into day, months follow one another, spring always becomes summer, and so on. Just as in the natural cycles, our lives are filled with them. New life will inevitably find death, setting the wheel of Samsara in motion again, just as dawn always turns to dusk. Even in the behavior of my body, I see these patterns. As a woman, I cannot overlook the circular patterns of my body. I find circles in my mental behavior as well. I carefully track my tendencies and have come to the conclusion that I constantly go through cycles of healing and self-destruction. These patterns are ridiculously obvious. I tear myself down, dropping to the lowest point, then find salvation in this darkness, and then I start again, licking my wounds and healing. I’m currently in a phase of recovery; it took me a long time to get out of a depressive phase, but I’ve clearly traced this pattern. Similarly, in terms of movement and travel, I see these patterns. Periods of stagnation are replaced by times of frantic movement when I’m too busy to wash up before bed and fall asleep from exhaustion.
All these coincidences are funny and seemingly insignificant on their own, but when they come together and form a circular picture, repeating previous patterns, it becomes interesting. Finding circular patterns in anything is one of my biggest life fascinations, and every time I discover a new one, I become more convinced of my theory that everything in this life is cyclical.
The PSAT was so stressful as I have mentioned before I am not a good test taker and the format of the PSAT scares me. The questions start off the same and depending on if you get them correct they either get easier or harder. There are two sections math and reading, the reading is first and the math follows after that. I was doing fine during the reading section I got a little bored and sometimes just picked random answers because I didn’t want to read anymore. The math section was so hard and my questions started getting so easy I knew I was cooked. I recently got my score back and keep in mind the test is graded out of 1600 and I got a 1000 so goodnight. Each of the sections are graded out of 760 on my English I got a 540 which is ok. On math just like I predicted I got cooked and got a 460. Genuinely terrified to take the Sat and I hope I go to a test-optional school because my scores are so bad it’s not even funny.
I was recently able to obtain my driver’s license, which will allow me to go driving with my family and friends when I return to my home country. I was also thinking about what I want to accomplish until I reach the age of 20, which is a major milestone for my home country. 20 is the age in Japan where people can drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and buy and give away tickets for bicycle, horse, boat, and auto races, to name a few. In my home country, the age of adulthood has been lowered from 20 to 18 since April 1, 2022. 18 is the age when you can do many things and take the first step toward adulthood. To be honest, nothing much has changed since I turned 18, but it is scary to know that I am already seen as an adult in the eyes of the world. Back on topic, what I want to do before I turn 20 is to go driving alone, take a trip to Korea, and score under 100 in golf. I’m not sure if there is any particular change I would like to make, but I will try to make the most of my last teenage years so that I don’t have any regrets.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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