Wow time kind of flew by with a lot of things happening since I last sat down and typed something for this site. A reminder email for paying the domain fee came up and I visited my site to check my previous posts. Left a bittersweet taste after reading my old posts.
I left Japan in August last year (2019) and have been back in Sydney for a year come August. I haven’t felt like “I’m home” since. More like, I feel I’m on a long trip abroad haha. I miss Japan a lot, from the nature to society. The culture to the people. My friends to my students. I miss quite a lot about Japan. The food… my god I crave walking in Osaka to eat 🙂
Heaps has happened. I have lost some momentum that I had while living in Japan but it’s not all bad. I accomplished my goals last year I set for myself in January. That was a win. I spent heaps of time with family that I had missed out on while in Japan. That was a great win. I became closer with my family too. This is probably the best thing to happen with my return. I also got a job as a software developer. Yay I get paid to code!
I think the 2 years being independent in Japan did me well, I have a more grounded perspective about my values and responsibilities. I also don’t interact with adults as a ‘young person’. By that I mean, I’m confident to speak my mind around adults with no fear or requirement of their validation. That’s a big one to me.
Now, I work as a software developer. It’s not game development, or some other intensive or exciting field, but I’ve found things I like there. My coworkers are very nice, the company is very accommodating, and I have learned a little bit since starting back in November 2019. I wanna detail this in a later post.
At the moment, my physical development goals are on hold. That’s upsetting but times of hardship and patience are necessary for character I reckon. My career goals are kind of in an odd place. I’m a ‘professional software developer’ which is great. However my passion for programming always came from attempting to exceed the limits of skill and knowledge. Work doesn’t scratch that itch all too well, but the satisfaction of programming to help others is fantastic. My favourite and happiest moments with work are when I hear I made someone’s life easier at work, or that they were excited to try out the tool I was making for them.
My financial goals are doing splendidly. I’m really satisfied with the hard lessons I learned about validating and rationalising expenses before making purchases. It’s helped me heaps with saving, I’ve pretty much saved every penny.
My Japanese skill however has kind of gone dull. Not a complete set back or decline, just dull or slow I should say. Vocabulary and reading has kind of fallen but sentence creation and speech are still things I can do at the same speed as while I was in Japan. And I’ve started singing along to a lot of Japanese songs. It’s really fun and double’s as reading practice for me when I look up lyrics.
I really can’t summarise a year’s worth of events in a single post can I? I guess I’m doing this for a bit of catharsis. It’s a weird year, with loss of progress in some areas, and progress in other completely different areas for myself.
I’ll leave it at this for today.