Why One Must Fall

What does it mean to fall?

Throughout the story of Remember Rain, I am trying to express a fundamental truth I’ve come to believe in based on my life so far. That I feel like when I aspire to change and try to become something more than the current me, there’s an inherent friction that continues to crop up over and over again. It comes in many forms, but in particular, it is a sort of continuous backsliding to my old habits and really the life I’ve come to accept as my own so far.

Yet, I still dream and continue to try to do stuff that will hopefully pan out and shape me into a better person. But more often than not, the change is subtle, if any at all. It manifests into a sort of slight change in my decision making, like increased odds that I will make a given decision towards who I want to become.

What ends up happening, I find, is that while I have changed enough recently in the past 3-4 years to become someone who’s willing to make major life changes, the coasting still continues and it almost feels like nothing has changed. I have decided to move to Japan, yet I’m here not dedicating enough of my spare time towards learning Japanese further as much as I should.

I feel like I’m a liar, a coward who can’t simply make the further commitments necessary to make the life I want come true. Like perhaps abandoning video games for a long while or to put all this developing of niche apps for myself to rest.

I know what I must do, but not really. It’s like seeing the path on the road requires me to make a sharp left turn, but it’s on a motorcycle whose weight makes it difficult for me to effectively learn how to make the turn well.

Layer this on with the feeling like I don’t truly have the community I wish I had, one whose ideals are so aligned with mine that it inherently pulls me towards action. I feel a silent loneliness that cannot be truly described. I have friends. I have parents. I have possible mentors and teachers. I can lean on these people for support and guidance, but more often than not it always leads back to me having to figure it out all on my own.

I know this is a truth, but my being is almost half accepting it as fact. I act with the assumption that I can only rely on myself, but often consider the possibility of inquiry to get a better perspective on things.

This is the problem. I am constantly trying to develop or establish some sort of validated model of what I should do. Even though I constantly tell myself I am an individual and I have a locale of free will I can exercise. It is proven wrong by way of me trying to obtain some idea of a baseline before I can act.

I really do feel that I want to write a big meaningful story. I feel like I must challenge my self limiting mindset and learn Japanese as both an alignment towards myself but also a test of my own determination. Perhaps there’s a deeper yearning I haven’t been properly able to describe that is using these two primary goals as a disguise, but it doesn’t excuse that this is my current conclusion so far.

So how do I get there? How the hell does someone like me who seems like the only excuses I come up with are always blaming my internal self and never really directly blaming anything external?

My life is at least relatively stable in terms of financial, educational, and relatively emotional terms. To blame my good upbringing that really doesn’t have a major tragedy that majorly breaks a part of me would be a very spoiled and entitled thing to do. What I keep yearning for is that I do something big that causes immense change, but always push the thought down in favor of “logic” and “safety”.

But the opposite is often what proves my model wrong. Doing things on a whim like making a video essay or traveling to an anime convention are some of the most impactful things I’ve done in my life. The impact is only really felt months or years later, but felt nonetheless. Granted, all of these decisions were paired with at least some preparation and thought, but the core decision was almost always done in an almost sub-instinctual way where I am open to the opportunity/activity, but my immediate feeling is worry and fear.

Now, I am at the precipice of the same decision making, but at such a larger scale that not only my family, but my inner being (my old self) has become a force that pulls me away from my goals. At this point, it feels that I need to let some parts of my life fall. To let parts of it die (similar to Dark Souls 3) in order to let the unknown transform my life.

I’m now doing things that my past self would think mean I’ve given up or have degraded/debased myself to: like working in retail or seriously considering being financially unsure to focus on writing/art. This is part of the metaphorical fall I’m talking about. The question is if I can apply this idea to my entire life in a new environment, a new world, to see if I myself can become someone that can overcome it all.

Because I know that I can’t guarantee I won’t fall in the future. Even if I could, I would be stagnant and be stuck in a life I couldn’t accept if it meant I couldn’t at least have tried to fulfill the yearning within my heart. Tragedy and suffering will inevitably happen, so ideally I must try to cultivate myself to become someone who can meet these things head on. To fully feel the extent of these things, but then to orient these feelings towards building myself anew.

Falling

I’m back getting sudden realizations of things I already know about, but sort of now have some inner feeling I “get” it now. While this is another cope as it was pointed out in some coaching sessions I paid for last year, having epiphanies is not that useful if I don’t actually utilize the momentum.

The thing that sort of “fell” into place in my brain is the metaphor I’m trying to convey in Remember Rain. While I did say that one must let go and fall to grow, I haven’t really figured out the fundamental requirement or really application of this idea. But it has hit me after letting myself drift for like two days doing nothing (I would not recommend letting this happen as it may promote sabotaging your day/life for the comeback to feel earned): to fall is to continuously commit or make a bet on a small attempt to change.

Or in other words, pull the trigger on what you want to try to become or experiment with, then let the consequences unfold, whatever they may be. This is the most effective on a micro scale where it depends on what you do in the here and now, the moments where you have a choice even if it feels like everything is trying to prevent you from choosing.

Easier said than done… though I might be able to give some evidence through my previous experiences.

As mentioned, I went to several anime conventions in the past, the most notable being Otakon 2024. The decision making of going to these conventions was to try to find stuff I was interested in and to at least observe other people who have similar interests to me. While I started to become more weary of wasting my time at these conventions as it really makes the following true: you get what you expect out of it. If you’re there to simply buy stuff, then that’s the experience that you’ll get. If you’re there to hang out with cosplayers, then that’s the experience that you’ll get. Basically, you have to direct your own intention and really make efforts towards it.

What made Otakon so unique for me was that it was a bundle of intentional but sort of made on a whim decisions. For one, it was in Washington D.C., a place I really had no reason for being there except that it was an opportunity to hang out with the other weebcloset hosts at the time. Another thing, we really didn’t have much of a plan besides maybe doing a few segments, primarily just us streaming in different locations. But the core of it all in my perspective, was this feeling of letting myself make a committed decision without much thinking and seeing it through. My joke of being a little unhinged was something I embodied during the convention; going with whatever idea we come up with and just did it. While there were some questionable decision points (i.e. we kind of broke into a hotel gym with a random key card we found on the convention floor), ultimately it was done to have fun and let our whims guide us.

What I’m ultimately trying to say in this long winded yap is that I need to embody more of what I did here and from similar things I’ve done in the past. To simply decide I want to do X thing, and to tie it into a small commitment I’m somewhat forced to see the outcome of. In context to what I feel I must do, I need to just start posting whatever comes to my mind. I am so worried about what if scenarios that could put me in a dire situation, I never consider that more than likely I will be able to recover and overcome it. While this isn’t an excuse to just do really stupid stuff that could seriously harm me in all sorts of ways, I do think that with some mindfulness that follows the committed decision, I will be okay.

No guarantees of course, but that’s life, isn’t it? It’s why I love Usogui so much in one of its overall messages in the story, that one should simply gamble not in hopes that you’ll win, but that the decision to gamble on life is inherently what makes one truly shine. While you will inevitably have no control on the final outcome despite having perfect preparations, within each moment of the gamble, you will constantly have to reassess your own idea of reality and make adjustments to your planning accordingly.

So I must make committed bets towards who I want to become and the reality I want to change around me. I want to become someone who can consistently fall, or really be intentional towards exploring and experiencing an unknown, and be able to overcome any of the difficulties that come through. I need to fall, not simply because it’s what’s required, but really that it is an aspect of life that reveals such a realm of endless possibilities that I will become far from the stagnant self I fear I could become. I want to truly shine and live.