This is what I’m here for, she tells herself. The bedcovers are warm, the library upstairs thunders with the sound of rain on its tin roof, she feels safe. The morning brings a familiar wave of loneliness. By the time she fends it off, it is noon and she has missed breakfast. She waits for 2 pm, for a burst of energy to germinate in her muscles. It doesn’t come. She drags herself to the bathroom and then to the community kitchen for a hot cup of “packet cocoa.” There are too many eyes on her, she thinks. She is wrong but it hasn’t mattered, historically. She slumps back to her dormitory and draws the curtains shut around her bed.

It is 3 pm, the next day in Tokyo. Day 2 in a new place. She is deathly afraid to step out, but she has to. Hunger trumps anxiety today, punches her in the gut, pulls her - by a thread attached to her navel - out of the room, into her clothes, out of the hotel, puts some words in her mouth for the benefit of the waiter and the customer beside her. This smiling American talks to her and she is so relieved she nearly laughs and cries at the same time. This is what I’m here for, she tells herself. They eat their lunch together and she feels like she can do anything.

She is trying to figure out the train system. It isn’t hard actually, just the novelty of an unseen place, an unheard language, and everyone she knows is in another time zone. It isn’t hard actually but when your card runs out of money for the first time and all the machines start to glob together in the eye’s periphery - which one gives you your money, which one takes it? - the fear grows exponentially and cannot be reasoned with. I am here to reason with my fears, she tells herself.

She is in a new city, Kamakura, in a new home. She has had way too many epiphanies, walking around town, feeling like a romantic lead about to bump into the hard chest of a beautiful man - a chef in a nearby restaurant who will want her desperately so the plot doesn’t fall apart. She wants to note them all down, these profound thoughts, but she can’t remember many of them by nightfall, the rest are deeply forgettable.

She is in a new place and deep depression. She is unable to get out of bed for the better part of two days. She waits for the sun to set and then comes out of the recesses with the bravado of a pre-teen. What?! She shrugs at nobody, I’M awake, I’M energetic and ready to GO on an adventure, it isn’t MY fault the day is OVER?!! She does this theatre for 2 more days and goes back to Tokyo for the last leg of her solo trip. On her way to the train station she takes a few pictures of waterfalls and streams and feels less defeated.

She is doing it. She is doing terrifying things - like travelling and being alone and talking to strangers and PERSONAL GROWTH - just to do them. And soon she will have walked a hundred kilometres, cried six times, and befriended a few strangers. Soon she will be able to say objectively that she is brave. She has done brave things. She will list them down and wave around the tiny piece of paper as evidence. She wants YOU - her friends and family - to tape the piece of paper to the fridge and think about her in a new light. Oh wow, she DID this, what an adventurous soul, she wants you to say out loud, while she is within earshot pretending to be out of earshot.

During the last few days in Tokyo, she is trying to remember the fun things she did. A digital art museum, so much good food, many walks, trees, forests, shrines, temples, more food, sake, she doesn’t like sake, solitude, peaceful solitude, a new country, a new people, new friends.

On her 30^th birthday she has a list of things she wants to do. She does none of them. This plan was made in a better mood for a more energetic person. She stays in bed till the sun sets.

On her 30^th birthday she befriends four strangers at the bar and only because she tries and when it works she thinks she can do anything, really, and she wants to bottle up this feeling to get drunk on in the future, but it is escaping her feelings vault already. It is the past already.

Her anxiety and depression are present continuous. When she comes back she is asked enthusiastically how it was and she says, it was good actually, I walked so much, about a hundred kilometres easily, I cried only six times and I made three new friends, or wait, was it six, but yeah I mean it was a lot, I learned a lot about myself, it was difficult at first but I got the hang of it.

You know, this is what I went there for, she tells you.