Why I Became a Self-Explorer (Part 1): I Lived Ignoring Myself, Others, and Most of the World

Self-explorer,
I hadn't thought of calling myself by such a title until last week.

However, after digging deep into my own birth chart as a sample for horoscope reading, I felt a strong sense of conviction in the results and decided, "If I'm going to be a creator on note, this is the only way."

Why the word "coal miner" comes up is a topic for another article, so I will write about that later. Here, I will clarify:

I will clarify that.

1. I discounted everything except 'myself as a writer'

"To investigate is to love."
Yasunobu Tanaka writes this in his book, 'You Should Write What You Want to Read.'
This is the sentence that resonated with me most strongly in this book.

"To love" does not mean to be kind, to get along well, or to be close to someone.
That isaffection, not love.
Because the Japanese word for affection is used loosely, completely different workings of the heart have been confused.

That is what it is.
It is not an emotion, but a recognition directly linked to survival (which is why all humans continue to have a desire for approval).

This time, I re-read my birth chart and realized something clearly. It was that,

That was it.
I had been discounting everything other than myself as a writer. That is the reason.

In my case, this obsession with 'what I want to write' comes from the fear that 'I can't die before I write it!'

The impulse to 'write what I want to write,' when pushed to its limit, is an escape from and resistance to dying and disappearing. It can also be called an act of externalizing fear.
That is why 'what I want to write' often overlaps with 'what I should write.'

What I feel after finishing 'what I want to write' is a sense of accomplishment =the pleasure of having completely excreted. As long as it is pleasure, it disappears in an instant.

The impulse to 'read what I want to read' is basically the same, but it is a style of resistance that is more focused on escaping than 'wanting to write.'
When something painful happens, by 'escaping' into the world created by my favorite music, manga, anime, or the idols I support, I am temporarily negating and forgetting the fear of extinction.

In these two states of 'wanting to write what I want to write' and 'wanting to read what I want to read,'there is no other person.
Even if there is a target existence, it is completed in a world of only one person, andtrue energy charging never occurs.

It only temporarily returns to the original state and does not lead to phenomena like 'increasing' or 'growing' more than before.
Therefore, neither impulse contains 'fun.'
Both areintensely healing, but they are not fun.

2. 'Self-expansion' that occurred when the shadow part was acknowledged and loved

I was stunned for a while when I realized that I had spent most of my life until nowunconsciously trying to heal myself. 'Are you kidding me... I had just been fighting the law of entropy for decades!!'

Once written into words, it is nothing but obvious.

Because all living things, including humans, win survival time by creating
dynamic equilibrium while fighting the law of increasing entropy. Even if I understood that in my head, the fact that

I couldn't distinguish between the pleasure of healing and fun was very regrettable and dangerous.'Even though I've lived for over 50 years, don't I still not know what pure "fun" is? --- Was I just "feeling relieved" in that moment, and that moment too?'

Thinking that way and looking back on the past, there were a few 'fun memories' that were not accompanied by a feeling of 'relief.'
What those memories had in common wasthe feeling that my existence had grown. That was completely different from the relief of having survived.

Among them, what was impressive was the 2-3 year period from 'when it was decided that I would debut as a manga artist in a weekly magazine' to 'when I finished my first serialization.'
Although there was strong pressure, during this time, the feeling of 'fun' never stopped within me.

How was I able to maintain a state of self-expansion and continuous energy replenishment over a span of years?

While having my name known to the world as an author and achieving the financial stability to live solely by writing were rewarding and healing, they were not directly related to the generation or maintenance of 'fun'.

The decisive factor was that the negative parts I had kept in the 'shadow' during my daily life—anger, pain, sadness, and violent destructive impulses—appeared in the form of manga works, and those 'shadows' were acknowledged by publishers and readers.

My 'shadow' was acknowledged for its existence and counted by many people as being there.
Simply put, I was loved.

As a result, I became able to acknowledge—that is, to love—my own 'shadow' parts.
And by the 'volume' of that shadow, I myself expanded, and throughout the time the series continued, a 'fun' state was maintained.

'I see...'
I felt bitter as I chewed on the second realization I had gained from delving deep into my birth chart.

At the time, I did not know that my heart and the hearts of others were structured that way. And because I was unaware, I lost that 'fun' and have arrived at where I am now.

(To be continued in the second half)