she dreams of her ribcage being filled with flowers

A journal update? In less than a year? Goodness, I can hardly believe it myself!

First things first, I no longer work at the horrid job that literally drove me to a heart attack! I've started a new job at a post-secondary institution (is it a vocational school? a college? a university? No! It's a secret!) as the eventual Head of the English Department. This is at once both very exciting and very scary.

EXCITING THINGS:
- My job is very peaceful! Coworkers are very nice, and everyone does their job and minds their own business
- We have a lot of overseas students, so I get the chance to not only use Japanese and English often, but also Mandarin Chinese (yay!)
- The hours are much better than my old job (9-5 as opposed to 8:15-5:30)
- I only teach 7 classes a week with the rest being admin duties
- The times I have to work Saturdays or Sundays for open campus events, I get a day off of my choosing!
- Ooooh, I get a DISCOUNT at Apple! Hehe!

SCARY THINGS:
- Me? Tell people what to do? Discipline people? Confrontation? Oh gosh. Oh no. I am so timid. Gah. GAH. Confrontation is the Worst Ever
- I now hold myself to Very High Standards because I need to be an example for the other teachers, and I am scared of slacking off (what if I stress myself out so much I end up procrastinating to cope and then I let everyone down! I can't do that! Everyone needs to be happy with me or else I will cry!)
- I miss Work Besties from Toxic Job. I do not miss that job, but I miss those two soooooo much!
- Did I mention I'm bad at confrontation?

The only thing lingering from Toxic Job is I still haven't gotten those forms from insurance. I was on medical leave from November to March, and so the insurance company should be paying me partial salary from that time period. However, Toxic Job has been pulling my chain with it; they last claimed there "was an error" and the forms have to be sent back. But I've never seen them, and neither has Lawyer-san. Sigh! That's five months of salary! Please just be responsible and take care of it!

Other than that, I'm doing my best to survive. I still do my tour guide side job and I'm trying to be more active with kimono and Mikosan duties, but it's been so hard! Definitely feeling my energy out; I was on medical leave for so long, plus adjusting to a new job...

I have to keep trying.

Oh, hello! Did you know I had an actual, real life heart attack last week? Exciting, no?

...No. :(

How I wish I were joking, but perhaps I ought to start at the beginning. Another long hiatus between entries (almost an entire year? goodness), and given how crazy life has been recently, I'm unsurprised. So much has happened since I last wrote in my journal, and I hope everyone has been faring well since.

In all fairness, this year started out with quite a lot of lovely hope. Fingers crossed (and toes! and ribbons!) that it will end on a much higher note than how November has been.

Back in February, I moved from my old apartment that I shared with my ex-husband into a proper house. I couldn't be more thrilled. I have a room dedicated solely to kimono dressing, and I've been enjoying decorating it whenever I can. Some friends gave me the loveliest housewarming gifts. My new house even came with a gorgeous tree that blooms with cherry blossoms every spring. It's been wonderful starting over in a new home that I didn't share with my ex-husband, a truly fresh start at long last. Being able to be in a home that is mine, where less than pleasant memories tug at my mind and insert themselves at random, inconvenient times...

Yes. This particular change has been so needed.

Remember how last year I wished to start out 2024 financially secure? Well, my prayers were answered... or so I thought. (Cue rather foreboding organ chords!) Starting in April, I accepted a full-time position teaching at an international elementary school. It's my first time working full-time since winter 2022, which has been quite a change.

To be honest, I rather liked working multiple part-time jobs; the variety in my daily routine was welcome and I had more time to myself. However, I have much more financial security, and I can't say I'm ungrateful for these things. Financial stability is nothing to frown at, especially after struggling for so long thanks to losing my job during the pandemic lockdown.

Time is something I tend not to have. My schedule has me working from 8:15 am until 4:30 pm (Monday and Thursday) or 5:30 pm (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday). At first, I was quite happy to have my evenings free, and make no mistake- I am still happy about that. But I was so tired and overworked that I just collapsed in bed every night around 8 pm, sometimes even earlier.

At first, I thought the mystery had been solved: I was diagnosed with a severe case of anemia (my ferratin levels were a dastardly 2.4), and once all jokes about me being the quisessential modern gothic heroine were made, I set to it. Diligently taking my medicine, making sure I took it with orange juice (if you know, you know) and praying desperately for some real changes that would make me far less likely to end up a zombie NPC in a Resident Evil title.

Alas, no amount of iron supplements in the world can make up for a truly toxic work environment.

To my shock and horror, I collapsed in the gymnasium of my school. Heart rate was 192, my entire arm was numb, and breathing felt like it was about to quickly become a dream of the past. I am eternally grateful to my coworkers, who called an ambulance and had me at the hospital in record time. I spent three nights under careful observation and was released with papers to take to my GP, confirming the worst.

I'd had a heart attack. I'm not even 40 years old, and I'd had a heart attack.

I haven't been back to work since and I've been encouraged to stay away. My doctor says that it's related to intense stress, and yes, it was formally declared a heart attack. I wish I didn't relate to this article, but I do: on workplace bullying and heart attacks.

There isn't any more I can disclose publicly, sadly. I'll have to keep you all guessing for now. Any questions or speculation you may have I'll have to decline or ignore, but for now... thank you for reading. I'll be okay! (I hope?)

My apologies for my silence; things have been turbulent to say the least. September was filled with adjusting to the new semester, the very end of it being me getting COVID, which was about as fun as you can imagine. Being that my morning job is to sing and dance with small children who love to touch everything (and cough on everything), it's easy to guess how I got ill.

Unfortunately, shortly after I began to finally recover from COVID, I received a phone call that if I didn't fly home to the US right away, I would not get a chance to say goodbye to my grandfather before he passed away.

I didn't have the easiest of childhoods, but one of the greatest blessings was that my Grandpa helped raise me. My own shaky relationship with my biological father aside, in all the ways that mattered, Grandpa was my real father. Losing him was losing a parent, and something I never thought I would have to do so early. His own father lived to be 103 and his sister lived to be 97, so I genuinely believed (and clung to the belief) that I would have another decade at least with him.

Obviously, I was wrong.

Aside from it being financially devastating to fly back to the US from Japan so soon after visiting in August, I've been an absolute mess emotionally whenever I've allowed myself to actually feel anything (oh hello there, maladaptive daydreaming!). I suppose that's just how grief is; one moment everything seems normal, the next you are a sobbing mess because Somehow, Something Reminded You.

Le sigh.

To make matters worse, I was so very excited for October to finally be over and to be free of this depressing time period, only for my other grandfather to die exactly two weeks to the day of the first. Thankfully, I'd gotten the chance to visit him twice while I was in the US and see him again, but... well. When it rains, it pours.

I am doing my best to hang in here; the end of the semester for my high school teaching job is November 24th, so I have two more weeks before a nice six week break (fully paid! huzzah!). I was able to enjoy a lovely homecooked Chinese meal last week; my student's mother is from Beijing, and when I told her I had lived in Shanghai before, she made me the most glorious meal! I can't tell you all how much that gesture of kindness meant to me, especially now.

I feel as though ever since I've gotten older, it's harder for me to properly blog and share my thoughts. Microblogging on platforms such as Twitter (and now BlueSky for me!) is much easier, and part of it is because I am a private person who does much better dealing with my feelings via fiction instead of talking directly about... anything, really. (I wrote this one-shot Phantom fic in direct response to people asking me if I was "having a moment" while visiting my Grandpa in hospice and crying like I do) But perhaps I've just gotten more boring over time. Who knows?

Truly, I hope you all are doing much better than I am and I hope your November brings you lovely things!

"The Nightingale in fervent song
Doth woo the rose the whole night long,
But to his lay no ear she lendeth,
Her head in innocence she bendeth.

Thus oft the lover sings a strain,
To his guitar, of grief and pain,
With glowing love he hopeth, feareth,
But even if the maiden heareth,
She doth not know of whom he sings,
Or why his song so sadly rings."
-Rimsky-Korsakov

Well. Talk about blowing the dust off a journal! The last time I updated this particular blog was... oh my goodness, *2009!* I was still in grad school back then, living in Shanghai, having just changed my major from Chinese Literature to Chinese Philosophy. Since then, I graduated with my MA, returned to the US for two years, met someone and moved to Poland, married them while living in Poland for two years, returned to Shanghai for another two years as a university instructor of PhD candidates, moved to Japan, got fully certified in kimono dressing here in Osaka, and have been in Japan ever since. I'm now in the process of divorcing, stitching my life back together piece by piece.

Where has the time gone?

It's so strange how much I've changed and yet how little I have since then. The ways I've grown have allowed me to not only overcome things I never even knew I needed to overcome (ah, the joys of discovering that things you clung to were toxic and did not serve anyone, least of all yourself) and yet... finding the parts of you that you thought had been extinguished, buried under the relentlessly merciless demands of an overwhelming reality that wants nothing more than to force you to being a cog in its soulless machine.

Thankfully, I've never been one to surrender my dreams to conformity.

So, here I am, once again attempting to genuinely blog my whimsical and fleeing thoughts, sharing the deeply personal process of reclaiming myself. I haven't truly blogged like this in ages, and I hope to find some comfort in doing it again now. I've done a little bit of it on my personal tumblr, but otherwise not much. Still, it's not like I've got anything to lose, ne?