157 consecutive days of running. 54 consecutive days of work.

$15 a week. 3 years. 5 cities. 8 moves.

Fired three times for my tattoos. 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Rejected for lacking credentials.

I am not independent. I carry privileges I did not earn and debts I must justify. 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　But I have learned from scarcity and support, from falling and being caught.

This is not a record of arrival. This is learning to stand.

I did not know what I wanted to be. I understood early how I did not want to live.

At twelve, I left school for six months and covered the high school mathematics curriculum independently. I failed the entrance examination anyway. My parents enrolled me in private school. Despite having completed advanced material, I started from the beginning. Japanese education operates on age-based cohorts. Ability does not move you forward. Age does.

In my first year of high school, I left for an online programme. My father opposed this. He threatened severance. We reached accommodation. I worked at 7-Eleven by day, studied online by night. Without external pressure, I drifted.

I needed conditions where failure meant consequences. I had privileges: educated parents, financial stability, options. That comfort felt unearned. The automatic doors at 7-Eleven opened and closed for customers who never saw me. Labour erases; creation, subordinate.

On my eighteenth birthday, I left my father's house, moved to Okinawa, became financially independent.

That decision led to eight moves in two years: Okinawa, Fujisawa, Tokyo, Osaka, London.

In Okinawa, I worked at a hotel restaurant for ten months. For the first time I spoke English freely—not as a classroom exercise but as a living instrument. In those months, I learned what it meant to build a life.

I got three tattoos on my right arm: l'existence précède l'essence, a figure climbing stairs, and 999—the inverse of 666. My body became where I inscribed choice. Each tattoo deliberate, permanent, definitional.

Resistance then: refusal in flesh. Unrecognised: not liberation, but voluntary constraint—discipline externalised, made permanent.

In Japan, tattoos carry stigma. Corporations refuse to hire anyone with visible ink. I knew this. I foreclosed normative pathways anyway.

After nine months in Okinawa, I left for Tokyo, then backpacked across Southeast Asia: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam. I returned to Japan with debt.

I applied to over thirty jobs. My tattoos meant silent rejection. At six interviews, they dismissed me before I could speak. I sold my iPhone and Apple Watch. I started day labour: sorting mail, cleaning apartments, hauling furniture.

Supervisors tracked our minutes, our movements. We became functions. My tattoos were supposed to resist this. Instead, they made me unemployable, more vulnerable. The irony was structural, not personal.

I lived with foreign housemates in Tokyo. When one began running daily, I joined. On day forty-three, my grandmother messaged. My grandfather had died while I was in Okinawa. They had not told me until now.

For 157 consecutive days, I ran. Not from theory, but to learn what consistency meant in flesh.

In June, I found call centre work handling inquiries in English and Japanese. On weekends, I worked at Marriott Tokyo until September. Every evening after work, I went to bars.

Then an opportunity appeared in Vietnam: a teaching position that seemed certain. I resigned from both jobs, cancelled my apartment lease, worked fifty-four consecutive days to save. The visa was denied. At nineteen, I was too young.

Precarity, debt-bound: unmetaphored.

I moved to Osaka. Found hotel work within a week, lost it within a month when my tattoos were discovered during uniform inspection. A third job ended the same way.

Some weeks I had 2,000 yen (twenty dollars) for food, transport, everything. Every yen went to debt repayment. I opened another credit card. Then another.

I had not abandoned the intention to study abroad. But after fifty-four days straight, after 157 days running, after dozens of applications rejected. I stopped believing the path forward existed. Osaka became escape: I worked enough to cover rent, then spent what remained on numbness.

Two years of saving stood between me and university abroad, years that would become three, then never.

I left Osaka and returned to Tokyo. I recognised: intention without discipline is merely wish. Wishes do not compound. The shift was not dramatic. I did not eliminate the habits overnight. But waiting for the right moment is indistinguishable from never beginning at all.

Then my father sent money with a message: "Buy something good to eat." His message was brief. On the train, I read it three times, as if certainty could be coaxed from repetition.

Two weeks later, in January, he messaged: "If you are still serious about studying abroad, your grandmother and I want to help." I had sworn to do everything alone. But numbers are real. Calculating wages against tuition and debt, I realised pride is expensive. I could not afford it.

This, too, was ownership: recognising when principle becomes obstacle.

In February, I moved back to my father's family home. Over two months, they supported the preparation. Approximately $10,000 before departure. I was thankful but uneasy. This was not money I earned. Integrity means carrying what I receive, not pretending it was mine to begin with.

On April 10, I flew to London.

The first months tested adjustment. I lived in a hotel with no kitchen, eating sandwiches daily. By July, I had exhausted my father's monthly support.

When I left home at eighteen, I committed to supporting myself. I held a work visa. I could have asked for more. That would have contradicted the contract I made. When my father called, I said I was fine.

Withheld words defined me more than spoken ones.

I went into debt: groceries, transport, rent. I sold my iPad. For three months from July to September, I carried that debt with no income. In April, my confidence came from external markers. By July, unemployed and in debt, my confidence had to migrate inward.

In July, I found work at a British restaurant chain. I carried food, changed bins, cleaned toilets, working six days weekly alongside people from India, Bangladesh, and East Europe —men and women who had crossed continents for the same reason I had, though under vastly different conditions.

Some treated me with contempt. I understood. The irony was structural. My family's support alone exceeded what many earned in weeks. The gap was architectural, built into the infrastructure of global movement. My family could afford to send me abroad for education while they worked to send money home for survival.

Kitchen: race-class simultaneity: Asian amid Asians, divided by citizenship, capital, passport colour.

Same kitchen. Disparate worlds.

Every shift, I arrived in formal clothes with a briefcase, then changed into uniform. During the day, I attended a language school filled with students from Switzerland and France—young people who had never worked, whose families funded London as extended holiday. In the afternoon, I worked with men and women from developing countries for whom education was an impossible luxury.

London was not one city but two—divided not by distance, but by inheritance. I inhabited both. Briefcase locked, uniform donned.

I created rituals to mark boundaries. After each shift, I walked to the Thames and watched the water for five minutes. The Thames did not care what I did for work. My value was not determined by whether I served tables or attended seminars. Work is what I do. It is not what I am.

At school, I met people who discussed politics and international relations. They influenced my thinking not by giving answers but by asking better questions. Education was not about acquiring credentials but about learning to think with precision—to measure claims against evidence, to distinguish assertion from argument.

The clarity I now have came from privileges I did not earn. These are not accomplishments. They are inheritances I must justify through use.

My tattoos remind me daily: 999—difficulty transformed into structure. Not as metaphor. As practice. Resistance and self-harm may be indistinguishable at the moment of choice, but they diverge in consequence. What I inscribed as refusal became, through use, a form of self-imposed discipline.

The marks recorded questions I needed visible at eighteen. Those questions now live in method, not skin. Professional fields require unmarked bodies. That is constraint, not concession. I will remove them when the time serves— not from regret, but because symbols can become obstacles. This, too, is ownership.

I did not choose where I began, only the direction of movement.

My father and I speak every two weeks now. The conversations are brief, practical. Distance clarified what proximity obscured: we had conflicting methods, not opposing intentions. What fractured at eighteen became comprehensible at twenty.

I write this from London in October 2025, six months after arriving. Not to claim arrival but to record recommencement. To acknowledge inequality is not to absolve it. It is to accept that my freedom was written in the handwriting of others. This recognition—that my choices rest on conditions I did not create—is the method Descartes proposed: systematic doubt applied not to the world's existence, but to the origin of my own agency.

I no longer demand that it see me.

The Thames proceeds, indifferent.

Before I knew how to shape experience into essays, there was this.
A text I wrote at eighteen, alone in a small room in Okinawa—not to impress, not to explain, but simply to place a marker in time. I posted it on Instagram, not from confidence, but from a need to say: I’m here. I’m trying.

It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t complete. But it was honest.
And in its rawness, something began.

It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t complete. But it was true.
This was the first time I tried to write not just what happened—but what I felt unfolding.　Now, I include it not because it's finished, but because it began something.

”I came to Okinawa. For many reasons.

One reason is that I thought it was cool that people were making an effort without anyone's help. If I get sloppy, I will lose my future. I am taking a huge risk. There is No way out. No money, No way to buy anything? No money to go to university?No good working conditions at work? I don't think it matters. I think it's cool that people make an effort without using lack of money as an excuse and without complaining to society. I think you should improve yourself.

I don't know why I live my life. My parents definitely get in the way of my life, using words like common sense. He has used words like common sense to oppose me leaving high school and going to Okinawa, he has crushed my potential and denied me that I can decide my own life. I think that he is dumb and bad person. At the same time I have caused a lot of problems for my family. But I know that he brought me up and taught me many important things. He told me that if I wanted to study or study abroad, he would give me all the money. But for many reason, I refused all financial support from my parents. And I would not let other person interfere in my life. I decided to take care of myself.　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　I ignored what my family said, quit high school and came to Okinawa. That is why my family disowned me3/6 I was conflicted about whether to prioritise my life or my family. I don't know which is right, but I quit high school or came to Okinawa.

I don't think now that family, owning things, being admired, etc. are my happiness. So I'm not myself and I don't know what makes me happy. So I don't want to think about such weird things and I don't think I can say that I don't know the purpose of life when I'm not trying, when I'm not achieving anything.

Another thing, I think people in all professions should be respected. That was influenced by Professor Michael Sandel. How can rich people understand how poor people feel? I don't think I can understand the feelings and hardships of poor people if I haven't experienced them. I would have liked to have experienced the kind of work that the world looks down on cleaners, dishwashers, that kind of work. We must not forget that they are the reason we are able 14/6 live. I would probably go to university, which is my dream, and contribute to society by doing a job that I like, something to do with economics, philosophy, politics, etc. A lot of people look down on dishwashers and cleaners, but I've been in those jobs, so I wouldn't look down on them.

One last thing, I just love Okinawa. The food in Okinawa, the nature in Okinawa, the sea, the people in Okinawa, the atmosphere, the diversity, everything is great. When I look back on my life in the future, I will be proud to have lived here.

I feel like I am loved by so many people here, people who talk to me about life, who are kind to me like I am their child, who are always cracking jokes with me. I have had the chance to talk to people of many nationalities, people born and raised. And I have heard so much of life here. I have learnt so much here.

Okinawa is like home for me.

I have many people at work and people I have met who support my dreams and I will do my best not to worry them and to grow myself. I hope one day I will be able to meet family members, friends, teachers and important person. I hope in the future I can help people in real need, because I have struggled. Of course I can help people in all professions. Of course I prefer being the child of poor parents to the child of rich parents. That's why I refused financial support from my rich grandparents and parents. I would rather be poor than spend my parents' money, not work hard and not struggle. But some people can't help themselves. So particularly I would like to help that kind of person in the future. And I think education is responsible for the bad aspects of today's society. I hope I can improve that aspect too.

I think the reason why I have good relationships in every environment is because of my humility and my communication skills and humanity. I don't want people to think I'm smart and I don't think I am. Nobody in the real world knows this side of me. On the other hand, I don't think I am as good person with a lot of people as I am now if I talk about dreams all the time or if I talk about stuffy things. So I would never say any of these things in real life, but I thought I would write here how I feel now.

So that one day when I look back at the past, or when I lose more of myself, I can remember.”

I can now read this without flinching.
I don’t try to edit what I felt, or how I tried to express it. I see someone uncertain but sincere—trying to grow before even knowing what growth meant.

That, too, is part of the path.
Not clarity. Not certainty.
But showing up anyway.