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 an 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 in the less than 3 months, 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 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 a 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 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 a 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 to 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 extend of these things, but then to orient these feelings towards building myself anew.