I used to enjoy going to Tokyo café’s to write when I lived in Japan. I’d go through the motions of being part of a community—ordering, sitting, drinking, and looking at my screens—but I wasn’t really part of the community. I liked living in Japan because there was never any pretense of me being an insider. It was a physical manifestation of the psychological state that I’ve inhabited most of my life.

I want to thank the handful of people who’ve subscribed since my last post, and those who came by to read, even if they didn’t subscribe. I’m always surprised by who responds to my posts, which reminds me of the weird way the internet works. We never really know who is going to read what. As people who post, we put ourselves into the position of orator while everyone else is the audience. There is no back-and-forth unless someone comments. I prefer one-on-one conversations. On the other hand, sitting alone in a room writing to myself comes pretty naturally to me.

I used to get really intense anxiety around posting, especially if I didn’t know every single person who’d read it. I’d over-think comments for so long that they were no longer relevant by the time I was ready to post. How does one write for billions of people? People are too different culturally, ideologically, and educationally.

In the early days of social media, I envied people who threw quips online not caring how they might be taken. That was before I realized how much of their time got sucked into babysitting their own words, and that was during those old naïve days when we believed that strangers usually looked for the good in us. Things have changed a lot since then.

The weather is never terrible in Tokyo (the occasional typhoon aside), but it’s often unpleasant. It’s either hot and humid, dumping cats and dogs, or just cold enough to crave an indoor hangout space. This, coupled with tiny apartments, is the reason Tokyo has such a big café culture. I’d love to sit in a quiet corner with my soymilk hot chocolate (I can’t drink caffeine) or my iced soymilk hot chocolate (does this even exist outside of Japan?) and watch everyone quietly doing their thing while the weather did it’s thing outside. It was another physical manifestation of another feeling I often get. It’s the high of feeling connected to people because of our basic humanness—the need to eat, drink, and wait out the weather. Maybe it’s just hygge.

Writing online feels like that to me, sometimes, too. Like, here we are, sharing a little bit of space while we wait out the challenges of our real lives, but it has to be in long-form, like this. It allows me to be in my own head and have a sense of community at the same time. It’s a form of contemplation that hopes other people are willing to stop and be in contemplation with me. Do you ever feel that way?