2024: A year in review: Or everything that’s happened and what comes next.

Let me tell you about my greatest ever invention.

It's something I exclusively credit to my success at GCSE and A-Level - a revision technique heretofore christened the Post-It Wardrobe™. All you need is a pack of post-it notes, a pen, and a wardrobe door. To be honest, anything would probably work - full-length mirror, normal door, or even a big patch of wall. Point is, it’s got to be a space you interact with every day, nothing hidden or ignored. In the run up to the exam day/s, you stick a number of post-it notes equivalent to the remaining days you have left to get everything done. Upon each note for the next two weeks you will write a task, or two, or three - but no more than that! Then, simply follow the schedule. Once completed, the post-it note for that day may be discarded of however you so wish - I always plump for a satisfying rip-and-crumple straight into the bin. Continue to update the post-its with tasks as you get closer and closer to the final deadline, and so too witness your wardrobe/door/mirror/patch of wall become emptier and emptier. Every day, you have a visual representation of your own progress, which is extremely useful on the day you teeter between motivation and despair.

‘But I haven’t done anything!’, one of my students says.

‘Look at your wardrobe’, I say, ‘look at the space you’ve made’.

I wish you could apply revision tips to real life. But there are very few deadlines or real quantifiable progress markers after leaving school, which can make it oh-too easy to slip into apathy and stagnation in adulthood. Maybe that’s why I found school and university so easy compared to now. One of my fatal flaws is a constant drive to be exceptional, which is so much harder to be when there’s nothing against which to measure myself. 

Apart from Instagram. Which is built upon lies. But the internet’s infinity ironically mirrors what it is to be adult, leaving all us users querrelling in the wake of our own lives’ possibilities.

I’ve felt that a lot these past few months, looking at my time in Japan. I wake up each day in my little apartment, and a parliament of little voices clamour for attention, sending questions and admonishments in various fonts and colours:

‘Why isn’t your book finished yet?’

‘Why haven’t you got N3 Japanese?’

‘Have you studied today?’

‘Did you forget about that Amnesty International meeting you’re meant to be chairing?’

‘Why are you so tired?’

‘You’ve got two days off next week. First time in a month - don’t you think you should take a little trip, it’d be a pity to waste your time here’.

‘Have you gained weight?’ (damn Japanese beauty standards)

‘Why aren’t you saving money? Such an embarrassment taking that pay cut’

‘You’ve got so many poems half-finished - maybe you could write some today?’

‘You’re staying home too much - why can’t you be a better friend and see people more often?’

‘You haven’t touched that book in a week - how can you expect to be a writer if you don’t read?’

‘How do you expect to get a job if you don’t fill up your CV?’

‘How can you expect to have good friendships unless you hang out every week?’

‘How do you expect to get this all done when you’re so tired?’

How?

How can I make it all worth it? How can I find peace, and a simple path down which to walk? In these moments I’m reminded just how extraordinarily human I am. Which is actually a real comfort, to know how normal this feeling is - so normal in fact that it’s only philosophical twats like myself with too much time on our hands who bother to whinge about it.

So what does one do in the face of a life without a set purpose? Without an examiner or higher authority to grade us on life?

Well, we create our own. If I was feeling particularly atheistic today, I’d talk about God here. Gods. Higher life forces and powers. But I don’t need to, because there are so many other examples: governments, legal systems, even certain rites of passage upheld as markers of The Good Life™. Weddings. Mortgages. Packed funeral services. Children. Promotions. Calendars. Tiny but beautiful ways of creating a rich tapestry upon which to gaze in our last moments. And when the rest of these options have been striven towards and examined to burnout, there’s the ultimate guiding light - Ourselves, Big O non-optional. Statue-like she stands gleaming in my mind’s eye, this mirror Titan who represents everything I could be if I just tried hard enough.

What does your Ultimate self look like? Who are they? What have they done?

It’s a very human thing, to split our unknowable time on earth into manageable chunks and checkpoints. At the end of every year we look back and track our progress, our slow Midas-turn towards greatness through resolutions and goals.Though most of these aspirations fall through, fail to stick in the grand scheme once life moves and people change, I think Chekhov had it right in Vanya when he posits that endeavouring to try in life is the key to humanity.

The eponymous Vanya in Chekhov’s play spends most of the play in a rut over his life’s amount - which in his opinion is nothing at all. Vanya has spent most of his life tending his late sister’s estate in order to preserve her memory, and only in his late forties comes to the realisation that his own ideal self may at this point be unreachable:

Later in the play, Vanya’s rage bubbles and explodes right out of his brewing pot of discontent via an attempted assassination. As he sits alone in his chair at the end of the text, his niece Sonia imparts the play’s core message:

This, Chekhov posits, is the point of Trying. So that - as might a farmer feel when climbing into bed after a long day tending his fields - we may rest easy for a life well-spent. At times it might seem hard, full of pointless suffering and inconvenient obstacles - but surely there is beauty to be found in some of those situations. The volume of grief in a funeral serves not just to drown but to drench in fond memories and a reminder of how we live on through fingerprints we leave on loved one’s hearts. Though Vanya himself is hardly convinced by this argument, he serves as a cautionary tale to spectators that we should not live a life bound by obstinance, that we always have the capacity to do more. That the pursuit of Trying is a philosophical path well worth walking.

And this is what’s worrying me right now. That I’m starting to stray from the path.

One of the best things about Japan is how convenient life is here. How streamlined and simple it is, free from responsibility and pain. Here I can live alone, eat out often, enjoy regular holidays and walk home in the dark with no fear. At times this reality gives me joy in gratitudinal waves. But lately those waves have sparked a fear of drowning.I worry about living a life so convenient, so free from any earthly tie, that I risk skulling forever into a warm, unremarkable eternity. 

Over the past year and a bit I’ve observed a phenomenon amongst many foreign-born residents here where they will secure a comfortable job and a comfortable house. They live a comfortable, convenient life of going to work, then coming home and resting, playing videogames, or occasionally drinking themselves till the next work day. Social interaction is not at all necessary in everyday life, and inconvenience is a thing rarely encountered. Recently, one of my colleagues divulged to me how, after living here for nine years after moving from the US, he feels like he might have wasted his life. What’s worse, after so many years away from the place on his passport - and the yen’s eye-bulging weakness right now - he felt there was no home for him to return to even if he left Japan - Sisyphus trapped in an inescapable grind. He reminded me of Vanya, soliloquising over his lost talent, long fossilised into a rough image of what his Ultimate Self could have been.

Suffice to say, he’s not doing well. And it scares me somewhat, reminds me not to remain complacent in my life here. It is for these reasons and several more that I have decided not to renew my working contract here in Japan for another year. Under the current economic system, there is little opportunity for true liberty. Therefore, to follow Jane Eyre’s philosophy, I must have change. 

Which leaves me at a crossroads. What do I do with my last 8 months here? Since working Saturdays I've found myself far more tired than I was with a weekend. As far as I’m concerned there is a choice to be made between three different aspects of life I could focus on. Writing. Japanese. A social life. Each of them is an entirely worthy pursuit, but all three cannot coexist if I am to continue living as a sane and unburnt individual. At the end of 2024, I will resignedly make this choice with a very heavy heart, as back when I had a weekend in my first year I was easily able to keep them all spinning

But trust in this reader - whichever one I let slip away, its temporary sacrifice shan’t be in vain. I shall stick to my new goals like glue, and aim to correct any minor slippages in Trying that have occurred this year. In January I’m going to delete TikTok, and Netflix. Try to spend a year engaging only with art that makes me think, and enriches my brain. Learn to rest more. Work on writing, try to linocut. Spend my rest time with good hobbies that will keep me balanced and unjaded and emotionally well enough to try. Vanya is a cautionary tale of complacency’s pitfalls, and I shall consider him when making my list of New Year’s resolutions. Next year may be an uncertain muddle of ‘what-ifs?’, but at the core of all scenarios is myself. Not my Ultimate Self, not golden or even silver. But as copper or tin I can still glint and clank my way through another year sure to be full of successes and failure in equal abundance. 

Whatever happens, I will endeavour to try.

I hope you do too.

Happy holidays, give your loved ones an extra big hug from me. Until 2025 I give you all my stars,

Yours, Char xxx