[Diary] Unemployed and Colorless: A Passport to the Inner Self

The park at ground zero.

Adjustment disorder, the doctor said.

The words hit the white wall of the examination room before slowly settling inside me.

Adjustment disorder.

It was a mark of being incompatible with the outside world.

But now I think.

Perhaps those weren't words to tell me I had broken.

Rather, they were like an admission ticket to return to the self I had left behind for so long.

From that day on, the sounds of the world grew distant.

The sound of footsteps of people going to work.

Announcements on the morning train.

The sound of convenience store automatic doors opening.

The voice of someone apologizing on the phone.

All of those things felt like they were on the other side of thick glass.

I was on this side of the glass.

Working was a given.

Waking up in the morning, washing my face, getting dressed, and presenting myself to society.

By the end of the day, something inside me had worn away.

I thought that was normal.

Everyone does it.

So I do it too.

I thought that was what it meant to be an adult.

But one day, I stopped.

Or rather, perhaps I was stopped.

My body raised the white flag before my mind did.

Saying, I can't go any further.

Suddenly, only time remained.

Morning, noon, evening, and night.

Time where I didn't have to go anywhere.

Time where I didn't have to meet anyone.

Time where I didn't have to be anyone.

It was far from freedom; it was almost despair.

I felt as if I had been left alone in a room that was far too large.

Beside that time, there was my daughter.

My daughter was one year old.

She couldn't speak well yet.

She didn't know what I had been diagnosed with.

She didn't know what position I held in the eyes of society.

Whether I was a misfit or on the autism spectrum, it didn't matter to her.

To my daughter, I was just her father.

In the morning, my daughter grabbed my clothes with her small hands.

That alone made the day begin just a little bit.

We went to a nearby park.

Every day, we walked the same path.

We turned the same corner, passed the same vending machine, and walked by the same bench.

It was summer.

The cicadas were singing.

No, to me at that time, it sounded like they were crying.

My daughter walked on the grass.

Rather than walking, it was as if she were playing with the world.

She would put out her right foot and stop.

She would put out her left foot and smile a little.

She would crouch down and touch the grass.

She would make a face as if she had found something.

I watched her from behind.

My daughter taught me every day, without words, that it was okay for me to be there even if I couldn't do anything.

I also went to see my father.

He was a father who had been unable to talk well for a long time.

I didn't know what kind of face to make.

I didn't know what to talk about either.

My father listened to my story.

And then he cried.

"I'm glad, I'm glad."

My father said that.

At that time, I didn't know what he was glad about.

I couldn't go to work anymore.

I was cut off from society.

I didn't even know how to handle myself.

What was he glad about?

Now I understand.

My father was crying because I was still alive.

Perhaps my father had imagined somewhere that I might disappear from this world.

That's why, the fact that I went to see him.

The fact that I was there on my own two feet.

The fact that I was still on the side of this world.

That was what he was glad about.

I learned that there were people who were happy for my zero existence.

Away from society, I was unemployed and colorless.

But every time I went to the park, the colors returned little by little.

The green of the grass.

The yellow of my daughter's hat.

The white light of a summer afternoon.

The red of the slide.

The shadows of the benches.

The breeze that softened just a little in the evening.

The world didn't end just because I couldn't work.

Rather, I began to see things one by one that I hadn't seen when I was working.

That ants don't walk in a straight line.

That even small stones have shadows.

That when my daughter picks up a leaf, she has a face like she's choosing a treasure.

Watching those things, I returned to myself.

Having become incompatible with the outside world, I gradually became compatible with my inner self.

Three years have passed.

Now, I have returned to society.

I wake up in the morning again, get dressed, and go out into society.

I talk to people, work, have a role, and move through my days.

But I am a little different from the person I was before.

I no longer call just consuming myself 'working'.

I don't call forcing a smile 'adjustment'.

I don't think that matching someone else's speed and erasing your own footsteps is what it means to be an adult.

For the first time in a while, I visited that park.

The grass looked the same as it did back then, but a little different.

I stand in the place where my daughter walked when she was one.

My little daughter is no longer there.

But she is definitely there.

In the summer heat.

Deep in the sound of the cicadas.

In the sensation of the soles of my feet stepping on the grass.

The daughter from back then is still walking.

Spreading her small hands, playing with the world, one step at a time.

I can remember that.

I can remember that world just as it was.

That was zero.

That was my starting point.

Adjustment disorder.

It is a mark of being incompatible with the outside world.

But at the same time, it is also an admission ticket to adjust to the true self within.

Time cut off from society.

Time where I was no longer anyone.

Time holding immense despair.

In that time,

I met my father.

I became a father.

I walked with my daughter.

On the grass of the park, I returned to myself little by little.

Adjustment disorder.

It is a brand of being cut off from the outside.

Adjustment disorder.

It is a permit to return to within oneself.

I call that park my ground zero.

From there, I began once more.