Good Fortune

My essay, "My Mother and My Fandom," was selected as a winner in the note Creative Awards 2024.

I am simply humbled that the first piece I ever wrote on note was read by so many people, and that it received such an award.

To be honest, during the first part of the awards ceremony held at the note headquarters, the question, "Do I really belong here?" was swirling in my mind.

Most of the people here are professional creators who make a living from their work, and people like me, who work in industries far removed from creation, are in the minority.
Furthermore, since I don't know anyone on note, I felt out of place and became a gloomy loner who didn't fit into the brilliant awards venue.

While I was sitting quietly in my chair waiting for the ceremony to begin, a note staff member came up to me and said, "I read your piece. It was moving!"

I immediately replied, "I wrote it based on an episode, so I didn't do anything amazing," but that wasn't modesty; it was a response born from the realization that I am truly just a person who put an episode into writing.

Then, the staff member said, "Even if I experienced the same events, I couldn't write about them like this," and in that moment, I felt as if I had been permitted to be in this venue for the first time.

It has been over a year since I posted this article. When I look back on the motivation for writing it, I remember that I had my own sense of mission.

I have neither the imagination to create stories nor the literary talent to write about mundane daily life in an interesting or funny way.

However, I definitely felt at the time that I, and no one else, had to convey the miraculous events and complex emotions I experienced during my mother's battle with illness.

Thanks to the words of that note staff member, I realized that even without the creativity to create something from nothing, how one conveys real-life events is also a form of genuine creation.

Hardly anyone around me knows about the favorite bands or actors mentioned in the article. But here on note, so many people know about them.
Thinking about it that way, this place called note feels like another world to me.
Here, I am allowed to vent about things in my head that I would be too embarrassed to tell my family or colleagues. Sometimes, I even get praised for it. Thinking that there is a world like this outside of the reality right in front of me makes life feel a little easier to live.

The biggest takeaway from this awards ceremony was the feeling that I had found a place for myself, even if just a little, on the note platform.

I heard that for this year's Creative Awards, new categories like Recipe and Business were added, and the total number of submissions was 52,750, an increase of about 1.5 times from the previous year. When I think that every single submitted work is a creation for someone, I feel an endless depth to the word "creation." I learned firsthand that everyone has thoughts and ideas in their head, and the act of outputting them is equally a form of creation.

Creating a place where more people can easily create. And by doing so, creating a healthy and wonderful world. It might be presumptuous of me to say, but after talking with various note staff members at the reception, I was impressed that such wonderful people are supporting the future of the content industry.

It is a disorganized piece of writing, but what I want to say is that I hope to continue writing something or other in the future. It was a truly wonderful experience that made me feel that way.