Why we need to talk about when we hate our lives

A section from Murakami's new novel : Wind/Pinball 

Everything that made my life hell in Melbourne is gone. In a way, it was inevitable. All those emotional shackles which made me feel like a dead person wandering from one life appointment to the next are nowhere to be found here. New places really give you a new exit out of the womb. You really are reborn when you move to a new place. I have the same responsibilities as i do in Melbourne here in Tokyo. Be an upstanding citizen, take out the trash, don't boof up your job and look clean and well presentable but it's not the same. As i said, i was dead and no matter how many times i say it, i will never ever be able to convey just how truly dead i was back at home. In the first two weeks here in Japan, i contemplated over the idea of going back home at the end of my visa but now that i'm feeling more and more accepted by Tokyo and the people who live here, i know that Melbourne will never see me again.

I find it so hard avoiding talking about how terrible Melbourne is because the terribleness is so important to me as a person. Two things in life matter, the really, really great times and the really, really shit times. I don't care which one you hold onto and feel strongly about, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you went through one or both of these times and it stayed with you. For me, 2013-2014 was a life or death decision. I can't forget it, i can't not write about it. Only now do i truly understand how life should be lived. But i always knew that life should be a particular way, it's just that in those two years nothing i did worked to make life work. I want you to imagine trying to do everything to make life OK and none of them working. And then i want you to double that feeling. That's the sort of feeling i lived with and that nobody should ever have to live with. I get so frustrated when people are so confident about things working out because it's never safe to assume that things will work out for you. That's fucking naive. So what should one do if they're in a time where nothing is working out? Do something extreme. Desperate times call for desperate measures and i took a drastic measure. That's always been easy for me though because I'm abrupt.

I tell you that i love you abruptly
walk away abruptly
fall into your arms abruptly
laugh at your jokes abruptly.

Besides my acclimation to Tokyo, nothing else about me is slow. I'm a fast person and I make abrupt decisions even more when i'm put in a situation where i hate my life. Hating your life is something that's completely worth writing about. I hated my life for one whole day the other day after i finished a day of training for work. I hadn't felt so fucking sad for so long. I felt like a stupid, inept idiot who couldn't do anything. Who deserved to be shamed and to be laughed at by everyone around them. On the train from Shinjuku to Shibuya i stared out the window the entire time avoiding everyone's gaze because as soon as my eyes met those of a stranger, i felt ashamed. This feeling is sort of incredible because of how fast it spreads in you. If your mind and body were like a beaker of water, this hatred and resentment of all that you are is like a drop of red dye that spreads out in a microsecond to every inch of you. One touch and your gone. I felt stupid and ashamed that day because i didn't do well in my assessments and was embarrassed because even though people say they understand, that they feel the same way and that you're not stupid the fact of the matter is, you did something wrong and you can't un-do it. It's as simple as that. I feel lucky that there's such a forgiving agenda sometimes. It's like peoples thoughts of you can be erased out. But on a deeper level, your life is a passport where the stamps of your past can never be torn or erased. No matter how people perceive me on the outside, i'm still the person who shat herself over wanting to get a good mark on her French test. I can't erase that out of the passport of my life. That's stamped in there forever. And you know what, you can think that's gross ( and it is ) but the less you hide, the less you've got to feel afraid about. Let out your secrets and everyone else loses their power over you. You've already given it away, what the hell else is there to lose?

There was a reason why that first Tokyo trip happened.
I was always supposed to be here.