A new role
I had technically been an adult for a few years already, at least on paper. But this year was the first time I fully registered it: I really am an adult now.
What surprised me was that the realization was not frightening. It was exhilarating.
I can sit with long documents patiently now. I can handle complicated paperwork on my own. I can drive. I have my own credit card. I can anticipate certain risks in everyday life, and I’ll even read the kind of practical guides I never would have touched before if they help me avoid trouble. I can go through minor medical procedures alone. I can also face certain disappointments about reality without falling apart.
The thing that pushed this realization along was not pleasant at all—honestly, the experience itself was pretty awful—but what it left behind in me was a strange kind of joy.
And yet, what makes adulthood feel wonderful to me is not socialization, independence, or age-based freedoms. It is something else.
What excites me most is realizing that I now have the ability to help younger people.
When I was younger, many things threw me into panic. Now, if I were confronted with those same things again, I could handle them with composure. Better than that: I could help someone else handle them.
My early life online was mostly spent around people older than me. The older I get, though, the more often I find myself meeting teenagers instead. Their worries still sound enormous, and they should. A first subway ride. The first nasty comment under something they wrote online. The discomfort and doubt that can rise alongside happiness. None of those are small things when you are living them.
Some of those same moments once made my hands go cold with fear. Now they belong to the category of things that can be managed. Somehow I have become someone who can offer help.
That matters to me more than all the generic freedoms people associate with adulthood—drinking, spending money, consuming whatever media you want without age restrictions. None of that feels as significant as this:
I can protect other people.
That is the best part of becoming an adult.
There is no shining badge for it, no dramatic banner unfurling overhead, but I can finally say this with confidence: both officially and psychologically, I have finished being an adolescent. People can come to me for help now.
I was never the cool teenager in class. Honestly, when I try to remember what I was like back then, what exactly I did, what kind of kid I was, I come up blank. Was I outgoing? Withdrawn? Did people want to be my friend? Did I want to be understood? Was I cold, kind, distant, welcoming? If I met someone like my younger self now, would I want to talk to them?
I still can’t answer any of those questions.
Maybe my memory is not especially bad. Maybe I simply have never understood myself very well, either then or now.
There is at least a rough map I can offer. Around age twelve, the human brain feels like a sealed black box—hard to examine, hard to explain. After fifteen, memory and self-awareness seem to become a little clearer, and I started cultivating hobbies I could enjoy on my own. By sixteen, I had become a fandom girl.
Life was especially kind to me in those years. My level of social ability was probably alarmingly low, but I still found friendship. My mood swings softened. My interests were respected. I never became the class Cool Kid, but in the blurry impression that remains, I think I was appreciated.
When people remember earlier phases of life, nostalgia often creeps in. It is a very gentle trap. Every retelling reshapes memory, sanding it down until it becomes a little lovelier than it was. That is how the present becomes survivable: by turning what has passed into something softer.
Maybe the most objective thing I can do is stop retelling it.
The embarrassing thing I mean sincerely
I have always adjusted badly to adulthood, as if I were permanently jet-lagged from the adult time zone. I wanted to stay on campus longer because there were too many adult matters I did not know how to handle, and because I believed adulthood was fundamentally awful.
In the second half of this year, I ran into a great deal of baffling questioning and interference. For more than twenty years, most people did not care what kind of person you were, what you liked, what you hoped for. Almost no one tried to understand you. But the moment you reach an age where you are supposed to “enter society,” suddenly people begin interrogating your life path and giving orders about it. They ignore your actual answers and simply repeat, mechanically, the choices they have decided are good for you.
It is crushing.
That is the adult world I was afraid of.
But I do not want to stay in that complaint forever.
The truth is that the social atmosphere and pace we live under are harsh toward both teenagers and adults, with no buffer and no mercy. That harshness teaches people to be harsh to others in return. It is terrible. We are stuck inside an unhealthy cycle.
One of the signs that I had started changing inwardly was the way I reacted to ages in the news. I would see a number and immediately think, they were still so young. Or I would stand in a line for PCR testing and notice a child not even half my height waiting quietly, and feel a complicated kind of guilt. Why are children being made to go through this? There must be things we failed to do.
I did not begin accepting adulthood because the clock ran out, or because the machinery of society finally pushed me into place. I accepted it because I kept feeling that there were obligations I ought to face, responsibilities I ought to take on.
This year I kept asking myself what exactly I had gained from all this damn studying, and eventually I arrived at the only answer that made my palms sweat when I typed it:
A sense of the public.
I think I should become someone who softens that brutality.
I want to protect other people, or at the very least be someone who can help. I want to be the one who says, “You don’t need to endure this.” I want to be someone people can safely ask for help. That is the kind of person I wish I had had in my own adolescence.
And I think I already have the ability to be that person.
So here is the embarrassingly earnest truth I once posted online: even if I never got to be the cool kid in class, I still have thirty years left to become a cool adult.
A new toy
My bedtime entertainment used to be varied enough already. I would usually have to choose between writing fiction and writing blog posts. Recently, though, things have become almost too rich.
I bought a new game console.
That is also why I had not updated my blog for weeks. Drafts were sitting untouched in a folder, the console was right there beside me, and I only have time to play before bed. For the first time in my life, I felt an urgent need for actual time management. There are too many fun things demanding care, and a day only has twenty-four hours.
A few weeks ago I was pestering both online friends and real-life friends with constant whining because, for reasons beyond my understanding, I suddenly wanted a Switch Lite with unusual intensity. It is light, compact, and the colors are absurdly cute. Just looking at photos of it made me feel like it was unbearably cute.
The Switch family only really has a few pricing tiers, but gadgets always work the same way: you go in expecting to spend a little over a thousand, then after comparing options and adding things here and there, somehow the budget creeps up to more than two thousand. I went from I need this immediately to maybe I should wait for the shopping festival, and after two silent days I told a friend I would spend some time developing emotional attachment to this not-yet-mine console and then buy it on my birthday.
Then I bought it two days later.
That is basically how my spending curve works: I want something, I search obsessively, I compare prices and cost-performance in agonizing detail, I cool off, and then one day I rise from the dead, do one casual search, and buy it on the spot.
The Lite was my first thought, and in the end it still felt like the most clear-headed choice. I do not play motion-control games. I do not need multiplayer. My ideal gaming posture is lying in bed. I also do not especially need TV output, because lately even sitting in front of a screen and double-clicking a game icon can feel tiring.
One of the reasons is that Steam never remembers my password. Every time I open it, I have to remember the password, enter the verification code, and wait for it to log in. It is such a hassle.
The Lite is the first game console I have ever owned myself.
After it arrived, I reacted to every game I opened with complete astonishment. What is this? So this is Nintendo?
I thought once I got the system, I would go straight for otome games. That had been the original temptation, after all—so many otome titles on Switch looked fun, especially the ones that never came to PC. But instead I somehow ended up spending every day on Animal Crossing and Kirby and the Forgotten Land.
How are children’s games this fun?
Everyone is so polite. Everyone is so happy to be your friend. You do the tiniest thing and they thank you with total sincerity. The colors are bright, the emotional tone is light, and the whole experience has this PG-13 gentleness and delight that I had simply never experienced before.
I had not even been on my island in Animal Crossing for very long before I started feeling how kind the game is. Before moving in, I chose the Southern Hemisphere because I wanted to live a different kind of life somewhere else. Yes, I had just spent the first half of this piece talking about my new identity, and then immediately did that.
On the island I often get the sense that the game treats me like a brave child who ought to be taken seriously—someone who can be entrusted with important tasks, while also being allowed to be afraid of moths.
Sometimes while playing, I cannot help wondering what kind of understanding of friendship and kindness a thirteen-year-old might form if this were one of the games they grew up with.
Anyway, my recent bedtime schedule has basically become nonstop gaming.
As for cartridges: I also bought Fire Emblem on a friend’s recommendation, but children’s games turned out to be so much fun that after the opening, I barely touched it again. I also bought Collar x Malice and have been letting it autoplay while I eat. Right now my favorite route is the police dog one. Who even am I. But he is so cute.
Unfortunately, even with a police setting, the heroine still falls into a very traditional Japanese female role. That becomes especially obvious in the green-haired route, where she is reduced to a tea-serving, pet-like decorative figure, and it feels awful. I also could not relate at all to any of her feelings when dealing with her younger brother.
When I play otome games, I often do not even know what exactly I am looking for. Maybe I need to decide in advance whether I want self-insertion or whether I am just there to enjoy the pairing, because those are obviously two completely different experiences.
I will stop this monthly record here for now. I know I have spent several entries talking about games already, but the truth is that my life contains many other things worth writing about beyond those two hours before sleep. Some of them probably need to be written about. I just have not had time, because I have been too busy playing games.
I have not even been checking social media. I am beyond planning at this point.
A thought that has been visiting me now and then lately is this: maybe narration does not actually have to matter that much in my life. Maybe what matters more to me is simply the story itself.
But that is something to talk about another time.
And, if anyone wants to know, this is my friend code: SW-2717-6651-0411. My success rate in getting online in Splatoon 3 is only about 30%, and my win rate is 0%, so there is not much we can do together even if you add me. But you can at least see my nice squid icon.