Process Diary #2 📚

Last April, I spent an entire afternoon sprawled out on the floor with my eyes closed and my headphones on. Though it had been an exceptionally warm and beautiful day, I couldn’t bring myself to leave my bed—my body, against all efforts, remained stiff and unmoving, which I assumed had to be an anxiety response of sorts from having lost my mother during the first week of spring. For many years I protested this very obvious message to slow down and would instead throw myself into anything that kept me busy—work, friends, family, school. Anything that could put distance between myself and myself so that I might avoid feeling what I knew was essential but couldn’t yet face. On that April afternoon, however, things were different. I was older and more stable, but what the most significant change was that I now had my house to go to—one I had built from the ground up over the course of four years, and one in which I could spend hours upon hours exploring. If you’ve been a reader of mine for a while, you might remember my essay “No Such Thing As Bad Grief,” wherein I discuss this house in more detail. But the gist is rather simple: Grief lives there, and I occasionally visit for a chat or a walk. The two of us like old friends as we sit by the ocean—looking out at a warm sun that never, ever sets.

no such thing as bad grief

An early sketch of the house where my emotions live. During a particularly challenging time in my life, I went to this house and found it empty—the parts of myself having vacated its rooms.

Several months later, in the margins of my notebook, I had written down a question to myself: How do Japanese people feel about dying? And when I wrote this, I didn’t mean the physiological process of death as much as I meant the psychological aspect of it—that no matter how meticulously we might prepare for our death, it is something that we ultimately have to experience alone. Last spring, I had also been reading a lot of Japanese novelists like Banana Yoshimoto, Mieko Kawakami, and Hiromi Kawakami—all of whom meditate on death and dying in their stories—but what landed me on this question in particular wasn’t necessarily through the literature I was reading but through the conversations I was having. For the better half of a decade, I’ve been researching the existence of metaphysical places and their significance in psychotherapeutic practice—specifically in how internal worlds, when used in mental healthcare, can significantly reduce the stress we feel during healing. In the United States, where mental health is more openly discussed, these sorts of places might be less novel, but having lived in Japan for almost three years, I’ve seen a concerning gap in care like this, particularly among adolescents. I’m thinking about one conversation in particular, when a student of mine came to see me at my office.