JITTERY

Something seems to be quite wrong with me. I don’t know what started this down feeling, but it may be that the kind of feeling I experienced when I met Mother, which had been dormant, pushed its vicious rough edge into me again because of a message I received from Brother about two weeks ago. In the message, he updated me on Mother’s condition. She had been hospitalized in the fall last year and a heart problem had been detected. Her doctor says that it is possible at any time for her to lose her consciousness or die. And she now cannot converse in any coherent way. I agreed to Brother’s suggestion that no active measures be taken to prolong her life if, or rather when, she gets hospitalized again. For now, she is keeping her good appetite, as I saw in 2013. That’s something I don’t have.

And there’s another worry. My business is losing money. There have been months of loss making , either because of late payments by my clients or because of an insufficient amount of work. Then, every year so far, I’ve managed to break even. Though it’s still five months into this financial year, I somehow feel the situation won’t improve and I will continue to lose money.

Overshadowing these two, and probably the biggest element for my sinking feeling, is this sense of isolation. This started at almost the same time when I began working for myself, or even earlier. I love a mixed environment of nationalities and ethnicities, with English as the common language, if you like it or not. In this supposedly international (English speaking) city-state, I find such an environment extremely infrequently, and there is virtually none when my fellow countrymen are concerned. I’ve said this more than a few times: “I’m not Japanese enough to Japanese and too Japanese to non-Japanese.”