Hello!!
I am continuously talking about how to change my life in this column too.
At the time, I moved to New York, I learned already over the years that women could have proper career in the US. That was first thing opened my eyes years back.
I struggled enough in the first marriage in Japan that I didn’t have any of my future career as a married woman at all. It was 1/4 century ago in Japan.
It was dream come true and I thought it will change my life and finally feel the way that I always wanted to feel…
To get the career that I wanted, I needed more education. I was accepted by one of the top Social Work Master program in the US.
Before I applied for the schools in the US, I was given opportunities to decide what I wanted to do in my life for my career.
I was finally given freedom to choose my career even though I was married.
It was dream situation that my husband asked me what I wanted to do in my life…
I didn’t know…. I had no idea of what I wanted to do in my life even though I was dreaming all the time that the time would come that my husband asks me the question.
I was doing some accounting in the Newspaper company so I thought of accounting degree. I was not bad at it at all and also I was working in the British bank in Tokyo before I migrated to the US too.
It was all about survival… I had to do something to make money and support myself that I was absolutely told to do them as a child.
I wasn’t allowed to do anything unrelated to stable and tangible to support myself for sure. For example, no dancing, no singing but I was going to cram school to keep up my grades.
And my grades weren’t bad at all and I didn’t even know that I loved dancing in fact.
In the middle of my life, I got freedom to choose my life path.
And I had no idea…
I had never been asked questions what I “wanted” in my life at all. It was all about how to survive in this world.
I didn’t even know what I was interested in as a girl.
All of sudden, I had to learn how hard to handle the freedom. How hard freedom feels like…
In my whole life, I was trying to be standard, usual and average with steady jobs and ideas.
Although I knew that I was different from the others. Being different was pretty bad thing in Japan.
I was raised in the way to be standard and after I moved to Tokyo, it was more crucial for me to look like standard.
I of course knew that I wasn’t from Tokyo so I didn’t have to make myself embarrassed with doing something uncool.
However I was still different. In Tokyo, I got a job at my first job interview ever even before I graduated from a college and surprised everyone around me.
No one spontaneously go to a British bank to have an interview like I did.
My mother didn’t believe that I got a job from the British bank at all because it was too good to be true and she told me that it must be fraud after she was convinced by her friends.
Master of Social Work is one of those most challenging degree ever and I believe it was true. However I worked hard to the end.
In the last semester, my sister passed. She actually killed herself.
I am going to talk about what happened to me after my sister’s sudden death in tomorrow’s column.
Have a wonderful day!
