It's Hard to Be Here

I picked up this book around June of last year. I wanted to read it after seeing a review on Twitter, and I was drawn to the title. For a long, long time, something had been painful. But I didn't really understand what was painful. When I saw this title, it hit me: 'Ah, it's hard to be here.' From there, I thought I should read it, but I couldn't find it in bookstores or libraries, and for some reason, I ended up buying it at an interior design shop.

At first, I wondered if it was what I expected, but the descriptions were careful and easy to understand, and it was somehow interesting. Although the obi strip called it an academic book, the writing style was different from what I imagined, and while it took some time, I was able to keep reading. I was also interested in the subtitle, 'Notes on Care and Therapy.' At this time, I was severely damaged myself and was in a period where I needed care. I couldn't see what would happen from this state, and although I couldn't do anything, I had nothing but time. Even though there was always a fog in my head. Here are a few things that caught my attention, in no particular order.

Dependent labor is work that cares for others. Dependent labor is like the role of a mother taking care of a child; in my own simple interpretation, it feels like work that helps someone else's life run smoothly by taking care of them. This doesn't necessarily earn money, and its value is hard to see; it seems that when things are going really well, you don't even notice that it's happening. You only realize its value after you lose it, and when things are running smoothly, it becomes something you take for granted. It's quite sad, even though it's necessary. It made me realize that someone is bearing that burden to support my own 'normal.'

I had a rather positive image of therapy—the kind you occasionally see in American dramas or movies, where you have a counselor listen to you, realize your feelings, and start walking again—almost like getting a fortune-telling reading in Japan. But it seems the story isn't that simple. To summarize it roughly in my own way, the therapist and the patient listen to the patient's story and provide treatment, but the therapist's own old wounds may ache or be hurt, the patient may try to care for the therapist, or they may find things within themselves in the other person. By healing and being healed, they seem to repair or reconstruct what was damaged in that person. The hurdle is quite high. How do therapists maintain themselves while doing that?

On boredom. The idea that you can be bored because you have 'stability' and 'sanity.' (I also thought about this in 'The Ethics of Leisure and Boredom,' which I picked up recently. I realized upon re-reading that it was cited in this book.)

I originally read this to unravel my own 'it's hard to be here,' but if you ask if that was resolved, I somehow vaguely saw the true nature of what was making it hard to 'be.' As written in other reviews, various things come into view like a torrent in the final chapter. I think what appeared there is close to it.

I had been forcing efficiency, cost-performance, and accounting-like things onto myself. When you get caught up in that, you lose more and more room to play, and your feelings get left behind. Often, feelings are just an unnecessary obstacle to getting work done. Somehow, this method worked, and fortunately, my salary went up, I was offered new jobs, and it seemed like things were going well on the surface. I just kept moving forward. If you can't move forward, it's over; you lose your value. Even if they are left behind, your feelings are somewhere, and like sediment, they accumulate unnoticed until they overflow, you can't move forward, and you can no longer 'be' there. I repeated that. But since I had long ago discarded my feelings, I no longer knew what was painful. All that remained was a vague, 'it's just hard to be here.' I don't know why it ended up like this.

There must have been various circumstances leading up to this, but before I knew it, I had become this way. I'm glad I sought salvation in this book. I suppose I need to explore the root cause from here on out.