Month: February 2017

The Quirky Hostel Manager (Pt. 2)

Posted on by Kai Raine

On day 2 of the conference, I walked up the hill through the rain to attend the 6am coffee session. After that, still pretty damp, I attended panel after panel. I’d forgotten my phone in the hostel, so after lunch (just as I was starting to feel dry) I rushed back to the hostel to grab it, and then back to the hotel. By 3pm, I was feeling exhausted and exceedingly chilled. By 4pm, I was just sitting working on editing my manuscript in the hope that I would feel refreshed after a little writing. It didn’t work, and by 5pm I could taste the sleep in my mouth. Even though I’d just started to feel dry again, I decided it was time to go back to the hostel.

The walk through the cold and the rain woke me up, but not enough. The walk made me feel manic with excess energy, yet I was ready to go straight to bed. I remembered that I had an upcoming conundrum: I wanted to attend a class on Monday that went from 9am to noon, but I had to check out by 11 that morning. I remembered that there had been a guy who left his suitcase in the office on the day I’d arrived and was wondering if I might do the same.

I climbed up the staircase to the first storey. I looked down the hallway and saw that that the man from the hostel was at the desk behind the window. I darted over.

“I have a question!” I announced.

“I may have an answer,” said the man.

“It’s a very dramatic question.”

“Then I’ll have a very dramatic answer.”

“Can I leave my suitcase with you after I check out on Monday?”

“Ooh!” he said, waving his hand in the air and practically bouncing in his chair. “I know the answer! Pick me! Pick Ricardo*!” He briefly stopped waving his hand in the air to explain to me, “That’s me, I’m Ricardo.”

“I’m picking Janine,” I said flatly.

“Aww,” he pouted, crossing his arms. “You always pick Janine. She doesn’t know anything.”

“Janine,” I said anyway.

Ricardo pitched up his voice. “I don’t know, ask Ricardo!” Then, back to his regular voice, “See? Told you so.”

“Fine,” I sighed. “Ricardo, then.”

“Yes, you can leave you suitcase here,” he said. “For the bargain price of five dollars.”

“Gasp,” I said. “That’s practically robbery.”

He laughed, but I was already moving on to thinking further logistics.

“So can I come back for the suitcase at any point during the day?” I asked.

“You can, but not after 11:30, for the simple reason that I’ll be asleep.”

“11:30 at night,” I checked.

“Yes, 11:30 at night.”

“That’s not a problem, I’ll be back before then.”

“Great! Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Nope, that’s it. Thank you so much!”

“No problem. Have a good one!”

“You too!”

I ambled up the stairs. By the time I reached the top, I was once again ready to climb into bed and fall straight to sleep.

*Name is changed for reasons of privacy.

Keeping Ahead of the Shadows: An Introduction

Posted on by Kai Raine

Of the blog series that I’ve decided to write, I knew from the start that this would be the most difficult. It was also the one I most wanted to write, because I think that it might be helpful to someone if I put my experience out into the world.

I suffer from chronic depression.

This is a scary thing to admit to the world, because I know that this will define how some people see me. In a face-to-face conversation, I’ll say, “I was diagnosed with depression in the past, but I’m fine now.” That’s true, but not the whole truth. True that I’m not in therapy anymore, and I’m not on any medication. I’m active and can find energy from day to day to do the things I am expected to do. But I am also hyper aware that I have to be vigilant in my choices everyday, because I could trip and fall back into the abyss at any moment.

I have to be extremely self-aware. I have to be able to recognize when I’m on the verge of a depressive episode. I have to be able to do something about it. I have to find the energy to act decisively and effectively, when I barely have the energy to do the most basic things. If I fail to catch myself, I don’t have any safety net as a back up.

Managing depression without therapy or medication is, in some ways, a choice that I’m privileged to have been offered. Many experience depression too severe for this to even be a realistic, viable option. But at the same time, it is in some ways purely circumstances that have led me to making this “choice.” It takes a long time to build a rapport with a therapist to the point where they can really make a difference; I’ve been moving around far too much in the past year or so for this to be a feasible option. As for medication, the types available vary from country to country. While there are ways to work around this, since it’s really only a logistical problem, I would get anxious just thinking about what might happen if I suddenly didn’t have access to the medication that I needed, for one reason or another.

But this isn’t a series about the fears and anxieties of depression. This is about the things I do from day to day that make it easier for me to keep out of the dark.

This isn’t meant to be a self-help segment. I don’t expect what worked for me to be universal. I do advocate for seeking therapy (with a therapist you like), and taking medications as you feel necessary. I also want to emphasize that a lot of what worked for me just came out of me doing something different on a whim, and then realizing, “Huh, I feel better today.” And so I would take that up as a habit.

It’s a bit of an experiment, since I don’t know if I’ll be any good at writing about an ongoing struggle that is so central to my life; much less if my experience will be of any use to anyone but myself. But I want to try this anyway, so here goes.

I intend this segment to have 4 subcategories:

  • Eating and cooking
  • Exercise: routine but not boring
  • Nature and hiking
  • A social life that helps

This is me, sharing ways that help me to keep ahead of the shadows in my mind.

“Where Are You From?”: The Beginning of an Identity Crisis

Posted on by Kai Raine

“Where are you from?” is among the most common of getting-to-know-you questions. It is also my least favorite question of all time. I can’t think of a realistic context in which I would ever have to rank my least favorite questions in order, but I can say with absolute certainty that this question would top that list. My relationship with it spans over two decades and has featured highs and lows and tantrums and pain and love of all sorts.

As a child, during my first five years in Japan, I always identified as “American.” As a person attending public school and living a perfectly ordinary Japanese lifestyle, I vividly recall a love-hate relationship with the notion. On one hand, I loved that I could always excuse my weirdness by turning to the memory of America as the place where I belonged. On the other hand, I hated the way that anyone could pick me out of a crowd at a glance as the one who clearly didn’t belong. But at the time, I still believed that Japan was a temporary thing, and that we would eventually be going “home” to America, where I would once again enjoy the feeling of belonging.

I was in a school of nearly six hundred students, but everyone knew who I was. Older or younger, teacher or student, people knew me. On a few occasions, on the way home from school, some kid I didn’t know would say to me, “Why don’t you go home to your own country?” and I would be hurt and confused and wondering who this even was and what I’d ever done to him. I’d duck my head and walk home and wonder, yes, why weren’t we going home?

In third grade, a new boy transferred into our class. We had to each go around and introduce ourselves to him. We must have been informed that this would happen in advance, because I remember talking to my friends Windy and Rilla about it the previous day.

“I have to introduce myself as being American, and I hate that!” I told them.

I still remember the look quiet, bug-loving Windy gave me. It was half way between exasperated and fed up. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time she’d had to deal with me and my circular logic.

“So just don’t say that,” she told me. “Say something else about yourself.” I heard an unspoken, “He can tell you’re not Japanese without you saying so.”

“Yeah…” I said, imagining how wonderful it would be to introduce myself with my favorite show or favorite hobby, just like all the others did. “I guess so.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon and the following morning thinking about ways to introduce myself. There were so many different things I could say, and it was exciting. Then I stood up to introduce myself and knew that I had to be honest. I said my name. “I’m American,” I said, and sat down again. No one was surprised. I felt resigned, but knew I’d done the right thing.

But then I started to have similar problems during vacations, when I would go back to visit my grandparents in the US. My parents would habitually sign me up for activities (like summer camps) while we were there. I would, at best, make one or two friends. The disinterest of the rest of the class seemed like utopia compared to the condescension I felt back at home. Then there came a time when I was enrolled in a summer school in the US where everything was just as bad: I couldn’t make friends, things I said kept on getting misinterpreted, and worst of all, I got labeled the “Japanese girl.” I cried at the last one, and a teacher took that girl aside to explain to her that I was American. She was mystified.

“But you’re from Japan,” she said to me later. I struggled to explain that I lived there, but I wasn’t from there at all. She looked even more confused than before, and just stopped talking to me altogether.

We had to say the pledge of allegiance every morning. I so wanted to be a part of it, to be American in this one way, but I had never learned the words and couldn’t understand them in the chorus of mumbles around me. Half the time a stern-faced teacher would march up to me to correct my hands, because I had accidentally placed the left hand over my chest instead of the right. I remember whispering to one of the girls if she could maybe teach me the thing that people chanted in the morning.

“What? You mean the pledge of allegiance? You don’t know it?” she exclaimed loudly. I hastily said I was joking and avoided talking to her from then on.

So though I was clearly not Japanese, I might be failing at being American now. It was an idea that I loathed, so I tried even harder to be as American as I could be. I started talking with my mother about living with her parents in the US for awhile. Surely, I thought, this would be the key to belonging. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)

Because that was all it was: I felt like I didn’t belong, and believed that there must be a place for me.

I don’t remember any one earth-rocking realization that I didn’t have to identify as American at all. I do remember that the realization came as a gradual shift. But there was one event that was no doubt a huge factor in that shift: in the third term of fourth grade, I was transferred to a different school. And everything changed.

 

The Quirky Hostel Manager (Pt. 1)

Posted on by Kai Raine

I dragged my larger-than-necessary suitcase from Powell Station to the hostel on 6th. I’d just flown in from Tokyo for the San Francisco Writer’s Conference that started the next day. I was exhausted and my phone was not making my day any easier: the battery would lose charge like sand through a sieve, and it would intermittently decide that it had no data capabilities. So I’d memorized the way as best I could and hoped for the best.

When I reached the intersection where the hostel was supposed to be, I saw that the building on the corner was under construction. I felt a little anxious—was this the wrong place, after all?—but was too tired to worry too much. I walked around the construction site and there it was: an unassuming townhouse painted in red accented with yellow and a small sign over the door that said “Europa Hostel.”

There was just a door and an intercom, so I rang the bell. A muffled man’s voice responded, but I couldn’t understand what he’d said.

“Hi,” I said instead. “Is this the Eur-”

“Pull the door towards you,” said the man’s voice, slowly this time. “And turn the handle.”

The door buzzed and I did as I was told. The door opened to a steep, narrow staircase. I struggled up the stairs with my suitcase, turning 2 corners just to reach the first floor. At the landing, the staircase continued on my left, so I looked down the hallway to my right. At the end of the hallway was a window that seemed to be the reception. Two young men with German(-ish*) accents were checking in, a process that was made extra complicated by the fact that they could not remember which name the booking had been under.

I stood in line behind them.

The man behind the window finished checking them in and handed them their card keys. He gave them the run down of the place, which was fairly standard.

“I don’t care what you smoke,” he finished. “But smoke it outside.”

The men gave a startled laugh and thanked him. Just as I stepped forward, another man came up the staircase behind me.

“You here for your bag?” asked the man behind the window, ducking out of the room.

“Yes,” said the new man, with an Indian(-ish) accent. “And can you call me a taxi?”

The door next to the window opened and the man from the hostel brought out a black suitcase.

“You’re a taxi,” he said very seriously as he handed the suitcase over.

The guest took his bag and looked a little confused.

“Can you call me a taxi?” he repeated.

“Yes,” sighed the man from the hostel. “It’ll arrive out front.”

“Thank you,” said the guest and left.

The man from the hostel ducked back inside and emerged momentarily back at the desk behind the window.

“People just don’t get American humor,” he lamented to me as he pushed buttons on the phone without looking.

It took me a good ten minutes to check in after that, because we kept getting side-tracked with conversation.

*My recognition of accents is highly unreliable. Take my accent-approximations with many grains of salt.