I’ve been home since the end of January, this time being back from almost a year and a half in London finishing my MA degree.
The first time I left home for school was in 2013, 23 years old and doing a double major at UCSC after almost five years in city college which got me enough units to get two BAs. I graduated at 2015 and moved back at the end of summer that year thinking it would be short-term since I might start a new lease contract in Santa Cruz. That didn’t pan out so I stayed home for six months. In the meantime, I decided to apply to be an English teacher in Japan during a fit of jealousy and uncertainty that other people my age are getting their lives together and having some degree of independence.
I left home in 2016 for Japan in April, and stayed in Japan just about one year. During that time I had visited home about once, while my parents visited me there in winter. In a rather similar vein, I felt trapped under the uncertainty of a career in another country, and so I applied for graduate school in the UK. I didn’t really want to study for GREs to get into grad school in the US, and also it’s faster to obtain a postgraduate degree in the UK than in the US, where the minimum length of a grad program is 2 years while in the UK it’s 1 year. The costs is also comparable to one year of grad school out-of-state in the US too, so I felt that it was a fairly cost-effective (or at least, cost comparable) time spent to get higher education in another country.
London was expensive, but I felt I should make the most of it and did some time traveling and meeting with people in the profession I want to be in. I also enjoyed the benefits of being in a city that values public transportation in a tight space, which wasn’t something I grew up with in California, and which I enjoyed only as a tourist when going to Tokyo in Japan. However, the lack of support for international students who recently graduated who are interested in work experience or in temporary work in the UK, especially during the time when Brexit is causing a lot of businesses to not want to deal with new rules in sponsorship (in spite of the fact that having sponsoring someone who has a Tier 4 visa prior to transitioning to a Tier 2 one is cheaper than sponsoring someone for a Tier 2 visa without that kind of prior residency) so I felt that working in the UK was not going to be a very easy reality to achieve. I know a couple of my fellow international classmates have been able to get one, but the exception tends to prove the rule rather than disprove it.
So being at home for a longer term than I had been in almost the past three years, I felt more keenly the things I had left behind here while I try to make a life outside of home.
Official papers and documents from Japan. Books I had collected since I was a child and piled outside from shelves. Figurines and models I bought online and from abroad when I go to anime and comics conventions. Clothes I bought that no longer fit me, or from the clubs and activities I’ve done in High School. Cosmetics and jewelry I rarely wear.
Mixed with my belongings were also my parents old belongings. Large coffee table books published from the 1980s. Programming manuals that are now so obsolete that the programs no longer exist. Textbooks from UCSB carried over from when both my parents attended that school for the BS degrees. Piles of old computers and wires and controllers and consoles from all three of us kids plus my IT dad.
I, like many people, had watched Marie Kondo’s “Tidying Up” show on Netflix, and i was interested enough to buy the Spark Joy book where she talked about her tidying method and how one should clean up. The difference between cleaning up and tidying is that cleaning up means actually cleaning the house of mess. Tidying means you try to find ways to manage your stuff and organize in a way that makes sense for you and makes it easier to put away. Removing items is just one aspect of tidying, and mostly, the book and method has you think about what things matter more to you than others, and how to realize that kind of happiness and joy through tidying.
Right now, I’m thinking of how to get out my figurines and models to display them around my room. I found old fan art and artworks I bought that I never put up on the walls. There’s old empty binders with clear files that I plan to organize my documents in. I stuffed four grocery bags with clothes and bags that no longer fit me or that I don’t use anymore. The things I find that were already in the places I put in are now being reconsidered of being used. The room I had left behind was like a place of storage for me, but now that I live here again while jobhunting, I’m confronted with the memories of the past where I want to have more of a presence in my current life. I’m still thinking of going abroad again for work, and most likely if I’m really serious of going into publishing I’d be in New York or the East Coast.
But I hope that when I come back, the room I had left would be alive with my memories in place, and not stuffed in a box or mystery bag.
(Which is, incidentally, how I had also misplaced my social security card).
Movable Typo 