Today is a national holiday.

There are a lot of people around.

I’ve been bedridden with depression for four days, so I had no idea what was going on outside.

I woke up at 1 p.m. I’ve been sleeping too much lately.

I smoke a cigarette after getting up and spend a little time doing nothing. It makes the depression go away, if only slightly.

It’s impossible to explain what depression feels like to someone who has never experienced it.

Honestly, I don’t even feel like trying.

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10月で一番調子良かった。

酒はビールだけ、タバコは夜まで6本。

明らかに飲酒と喫煙量が減っている。

朝は6時半に起きて散歩。

夜の睡眠はあまり良くなかった。

朝の読書は幸せだった。

そのあと昼寝をして、とんでもなく気持ちよかった。

仕事で成果が出た。2ヶ月取り組んでいた新規事業のonequeのyoutubeチャンネルが収益化した。再来月からスポンサーが切れるので、かなり安心材料。

就労自立支援金の振り込みも確定した。

病院に電話して、障害年金の受給の申請も開始した。

調子いい今だからこそ、金銭の土台を固めておこう。

昼過ぎにいつもの公園のスタバへ。

カモを見ていたらおじいちゃんに話しかけられて、心が和んだ。

スタバではぼーっとしたり仕事したり。

朝の時間と、スタバの時間が好きだ。

考えてみると、1日の中…

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Like I wrote yesterday, I’ve really been in a bad way lately.

I stayed home almost all the time, couldn’t work, and watched my money drain away.

And the bills for rent and for moving out kept coming. I thought I was going to die.

Today I slept about twelve hours, and for the first time in a while I managed to read in the morning.

“Morning” is generous. I didn’t get up until around one in the afternoon, so it was really noon.

For the past few days even getting out of bed was hard, and I spent nearly all of it under the covers.

Today the depression lifted all at once, as if someone had pulled it out.

I felt like going out.

There’s a typhoon heading for Japan right now, but I didn’t care. I went to a café nearby and got some work done.

Thanks to everyone’s support these past few days, the money situation has worked out for now.

I’m really grateful.

Some of my old anti-fans in Japan left comments like, “How much money do you want? Go get a job.”

I can’t work.

Why is it so hard for people in Japan to understand that someone can’t work?

And Japan doesn’t have much of a culture of support, so people are harsh on anyone in need.

Oops. If I write any more I’ll slip into Japan-analysis mode again, so I’ll stop here.

Still, when you’re in a bad stretch, it feels like it will last the rest of your life. It usually passes in a few days.

Some people are convinced it will last forever, and despair, and take their own lives. I think that’s a terrible waste.

So even when things are hard, I try to live by one thought: tomorrow will be different.

That motto is something I want to pass on to all of you.

Now, today I put the essays that did well on Gumroad back on sale, all at once.

I’d be happy if you bought them.

About money: it isn’t realistic to lean on all of you forever, so I’m planning to build a few businesses.

I do worry whether my money will last until they become stable.

I’m the kind of person who quits even an easy part-time job within five days, so I’ve given up on being employed.

Right now, the boxing media has started earning money.

The other piece is my income as a writer under miyama void.

Honestly, writing income is very unstable, and I don’t want it to be my main income.

There are all kinds of ways to live, and I’m going to look for mine.

For now, my goal is to make my income stable.

If I can do that, I think I’ll be able to focus more on boxing and the rest.

This got long, but my work is held up by all of you.

I was able to come back this quickly because of you.

There will be more bad stretches in my life, I’m sure. But I want to keep living, and not forget that I have it in me to come back.

Thank you for reading to the end.

Ten short essays are for sale today.

Two are new this month. Worry is about a 1.2-million-yen move-out bill, the person who probably had to send it, and the one-second stomachache we let run our lives. Active Pain is about shadowboxing in an internet café, buying 5,000-yen philosophy books on 120,000 yen a month, and choosing the pain that moves you over the pain that keeps you still.

The other eight were off the shelf for a while. They’re back: Escape, Oblivion, Molting, Money, Imprint, That Person and Summer, Human Defect, and The Self That Wants to Be Alive. I redrew every cover so the ten sit together as one set.

If you want a place to start, Escape is the first time I was homeless. Oblivion is the week a video of mine went viral and I got dumped.

Each one is a short PDF, small enough to read in one sitting. $9 or more — pay what you want, $12 if you think it earned it.

• Worry — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/worry

• Active Pain — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/active-pain

• Escape — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/escape

• Oblivion — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/oblivion

• Molting — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/molting

• Money — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/money

• Imprint — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/imprint

• That Person and Summer — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/summer

• Human Defect — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/wnpki

• The Self That Wants to Be Alive — https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/alive

Patrons get everything I write, from $5/month: https://www.patreon.com/miyama921

— miyama

I’ve been feeling pretty bad lately.

I was doing well until this Monday. I got back into boxing last week and had been training pretty seriously.

But then, on Tuesday, I suddenly fell into depression.

Depression really is a pain in the ass.

I’ve been living with it for six years. It feels like I’m carrying a huge handicap in life.

Strictly speaking, I have bipolar disorder. The gap between my good days and bad days is extreme.

In September, I was in a manic state. I wasn’t managing my spending properly, and I was drinking too much.

That continued until recently, and then I suddenly crashed into depression.

I don’t know why.

There are a lot of things stressing me out.

I still haven’t finished paying the moving-out fees for my old apartment. They’ve charged me ¥60,000.

I have absolutely no idea where I’m supposed to get that kind of money.

And I quit my part-time job, too.

It really makes me feel like I’m just not capable of working.

Even thinking about the job made my depression worse.

Those were the two main sources of stress.

Money is always a problem.

I also feel guilty about constantly asking for support on Instagram.

Because I keep posting things like that, my follower count keeps dropping.

Six months ago, I was receiving public assistance, so I could focus on making viral Reels without worrying about money, and my follower count was growing.

Now my social media presence is struggling, too.

I’m also about to start a new business, but it’s going to take a huge amount of time and money.

I’ve given up on the idea of holding down a regular job.

I’ve accepted that I’m disabled.

That means I can’t survive in ordinary society.

So I have no choice but to create my own work.

But even that is incredibly difficult.

My boxing YouTube channel has finally been monetized, at least, but I have no idea how much money it’ll actually bring in.

Will it even make a difference to my living expenses?

Will I ever be able to get married living like this?

I keep going around in circles, thinking about all these things until my stomach starts hurting. I lie in bed, unable to move, and before I know it, it’s already evening.

That’s what my days have been like.

I’m also falling behind my peers in boxing because I keep taking time off.

I’m afraid of getting punched.

I feel like I’m running away from it forever.

I don’t even know if I’ll ever become a professional boxer.

And when I think about it, I’ve failed at everything I’ve tried: getting into the University of Tokyo, becoming a professional illustrator, becoming a philosopher, becoming a professional boxer.

I feel like a failure at life.

I keep thinking about all of this until six in the evening.

I wrote this by deliberately condensing the thoughts that go through my head on days when I’m feeling bad.

I’m not always this negative.

I’m feeling a little better now, so I’m able to look back on those thoughts with some distance.

Once I’m feeling better again, I’ll probably wonder, “Why was I even thinking like that?”

I don’t have worries now, but I do fall into a strange anxiety, a kind of pain.

A lot of you may already know this, but I’ve lived in a facility, been homeless, lived in internet cafés — I have genuinely been through poverty at the bottom of Japan.

So back then, survival itself was the worry.

No money, no home; and once I had a place, no way to pay the rent.

Those were my worries in those days.

Those worries were terrifying. They crushed me so completely that I couldn’t feel the seasons change.

My stomach hurt all the time.

To get out of it, I threw myself furiously into all kinds of things.

Some of them were for money, of course. And some of them were things I simply couldn’t not do.

First, boxing.

Boxing your way out of poverty is irrational.

There are monthly fees, and it wears the body down.

But even while I was living in the internet café, I couldn’t stop doing roadwork and shadowboxing.

Living there, I’d ask ChatGPT how you learn Russian-style footwork, and then go practice it.

Rationally, the way out of homelessness is to get a job.

But for me, doing the irrational thing was the rational one.

That’s the thing I most want to put down this time.

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Maybe it started when I turned twenty-six.

It feels like I suddenly got stronger.

Up until twenty-five, I was always worried about something.

Money, work, my parents.

Solve one thing and the next problem comes rolling in.

Even in the middle of time that was supposed to be enjoyable, I’d suddenly think, “Ah — can I make rent this month…”, and the anxiety would come and my stomach would start to hurt.

And a phone call chasing an unpaid bill was, to me, the signal that my life was about to fall apart.

Until recently I was too weak to live in this society that keeps changing so fast.

These days it isn’t so much that I’ve gotten strong as that I’ve gotten thick-skinned.

Outrageously thick-skinned.

The other day a bill arrived for 1.2 million yen in move-out costs on my old place.

For the me of a little while ago, that is an instant-death number.

Working with Claude, I sent the real estate company an email to beat back their outrageous bill.

Saying things like: “In light of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport’s Guidelines on Disputes Concerning Restoration to Original Condition, I am unable to bear this expense.”

I tried to imagine the person who sent me that invoice.

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The name I write under has changed from miyama to toshiki.

I think the reason will make sense later on.

Summer is completely over now.

Short sleeves were too cold, so I pulled the long-sleeved shirts out of the closet.

Writing alone isn’t going to put food on the table, so I’ve started a part-time job.

I have one major patron right now, and that support ends in November.

So from here on I have to earn the money myself.

Can I actually live on a part-time wage and writing? We’ll find out.

The job is at a café — the same chain I worked for years ago.

I’ve only just finished my first day, and I’m still a little tense.

Above all, it starts at eight in the morning, so I have to get up early.

Seven would technically be early enough, but I don’t want to cut into my morning reading, so I’ve been getting up at 5:30.

Getting up early isn’t painful. Going to bed early is.

Because I love staying up late.

Drinking at night with YouTube on, I feel like I’m let out of the stress.

But I wonder why it is.

I have less stress than I did last year, and still the sense of not being filled is enormous.

Two months ago my girlfriend and I broke up.

I’m still dragging it around.

Why did it end right before I moved; if only I’d done things differently back then — my head fills up with that.

It’s not that I’m unwell, exactly, but lately I understand less and less what I’m living for.

Life is going well, and there are things I want to do, and still a “so what?” drifts through my head.

But I’ve been meeting a lot of new people lately.

I started the job, and I’ve been going to this thing called philosophy dialogue.

I made a friend there.

Everyone sits in a circle and talks about the kind of thing they’d never normally say out loud, so you get close to people naturally.

I quit the boxing gym, but I might go back, or I might switch to a different one.

That’s still undecided.

Either way, I love boxing.

Lately I’ve been practicing southpaw on my own.

I’ve trained orthodox this whole time, so it brings back when I first started boxing.

Tomorrow I work.

Once getting up early becomes a habit, the not-wanting-to-go will go away too.

Right now I think it’s better not to have too much free time.

Stay busy, and outrun the sadness of the breakup.

All the same — I got up early, so I’m sleepy.

The “rebuilt my life from homelessness” kind of video.

I’ve made a number of videos like that before.

Usually one goes viral whenever a phase of my life changes.

This time it was mostly about escaping the factory district, moving into Tokyo, and the daily life of getting a pro boxing license.

Normally I’m happy when a video like that gets views, but this time I wasn’t.

It took ten days to put that video out.

“This is goodbye.”

I saw that message from my partner at a Starbucks in a park where the cicadas were screaming.

People often say that right after a loss, a person can’t take the fact in.

I ended up in that state too.

It was like being underwater with lead attached to my feet.

Sinking further and further, no way to breathe.

Almost like I was asking for help, I called my mother.

“She dumped me.”

“I see. Well, why don’t you come over?”

Looking at the pond in that park, I cried in a way no one would notice.

The new place I’d just moved into was scattered with her things.

I didn’t know what to do with the slippers I’d only just bought.

I threw everything out, one after another, and carried it to the garbage area.

Worn out from processing emotions, I napped like mud.

I woke up, and before the sense of loss could rise again, I headed to the station.

I took the train to my family’s house, in a corner of Tokyo.

When I arrived, my parents were exactly as always.

They didn’t particularly worry about me. They talked about the vegetables coming out of the field.

I went out to the field with my father and harvested tomatoes and ginger.

“These taste good with beer.”

He said that, so I drank for the first time in a long while.

Drinking, going out into nature, sleeping a lot — trying to float the version of me that had sunk underwater back to the surface.

I ended up seeing my childhood friend for the first time in a year.

We went to the river and spaced out together.

He’s a musician with 13,000 listeners.

I make my living from art, with 60,000 followers.

“Art doesn’t pay, huh.”

“Yeah. But we don’t want to work, do we.”

“Maybe we do this because we don’t want to work.”

“Maybe if I’d worked a real job I wouldn’t have been dumped.”

“All that stuff sounds like a hassle to me. I don’t want a relationship.”

“But you haven’t had a girlfriend in three years. Isn’t that kind of bad?”

“No, that’s just a fixed idea society decided on—”

There were people at the river on their Obon holiday.

Looking at two guys mumbling to each other on the riverbank, nobody would ever guess they were both artists.

After being healed by my family and my friend, it was time to go back to the new place.

On the train home, I uploaded that video.

When I was making it, I still had a partner.

Back then I had just moved in, and I was excited about the future ahead.

The boxing gym was closer now, and so were the places we could go on dates.

But after I came back, the new place felt unnecessary.

There’s no one to talk to about boxing, and the café we were going to go to, we never will.

I envied the version of myself in that video.

Running through the factory district.

Smoking in a filthy apartment.

Back then, I was looking at the future.

But if the me from back then saw the me of now, he’d envy me.

A modern apartment with concrete walls, a MacBook, Starbucks.

Coming back to the new place after all that time, none of it filled me.

What filled me was the time we talked about the new apartment in that filthy place,

a beautiful winter dusk in a park out in the countryside.

Only those memories filled me.

But back then had its own difficulties.

Money anxiety, being cut off from my family, illness.

I thought it would worry her, so I tried to become a decent person.

And I think I actually did.

I live in a clean apartment, and it’s not like I have no money.

I have a family who takes me to the field.

Why is it that the moment you become decent, the important things disappear?

If that’s how it is, wouldn’t it have been fine to stay like that forever?

The me from back then would say no.

“Things were good back then.”

Looking back, I’ve thought that my whole life.

When I lived in that run-down apartment, I regretted cutting my family off. Now I regret letting go of that run-down apartment.

The me in that video never imagined that two weeks later he’d be missing that scenery.

But the same thing can be said now.

A year from now, I’ll have gained something and lost something again.

And then I’ll think:

“It was good back then, going to the field with my father, mumbling with my childhood friend at the river.”

Or something like that.

It was around when I was finally recovering from my illness, and I was throwing myself into boxing.

Every day I ran, went to the gym, and came back to the industrial district in Chiba.

I was still on welfare and getting ready to start a business, so the money anxiety never let up.

At night my autonomic nervous system went haywire, so I took sleeping pills and went to bed early.

The lake I saw in the middle of those days burned itself into me for good.

And the people I was close to then felt like the most important people of my life.

Back then life was giving me trouble, but I had heat for it.

My body was in bad shape all the time, and in exchange my Instagram followers kept climbing and my boxing kept getting better.

The writing I did then became the prototype for the writing I do now.

So living was hard, but there was a fullness to it.

Little by little money got easier, and I moved.

No more twenty-minute walks to the supermarket, no more going one town over for a Starbucks.

But the move took everything from me.

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With that, I came off welfare.

What I regret now is that I poured every nerve into the registration and getting off welfare, and I barely remember anything else from that time.

“We’ll be able to move soon,” I said.

“I can’t wait to see the new place,” that person said.

We were looking at the future.

We were looking at it so hard that we lost sight of the present.

One day the royalties from the book pushed my revenue up all at once, and the move became possible.

I bought clothes for the first time in ages and went into Tokyo for the day.

Thinking about it now, was there any point in moving?

One week after the move, that person was gone.

It was because that person existed that I could box.

Going to the gym alone, all you get is tired.

Two months after the move, I quit.

A future that was supposed to be there vanished in one stroke.

“Miyama, you could turn pro.”

“Ah, I don’t know about that.”

“Do you think you want to fight?”

“I want to, but I’m still scared.”

The one I used to talk with like that was another “that person,” and they’re gone now too.

That person has moved to Tokyo.

Films were the thing we had in common, but going out of my way to invite them to a theater feels too familiar, and I hold back.

It isn’t so much that that person isn’t here, as that they left me.

I didn’t have the vitality left to keep boxing while carrying that person’s expectations.

As my revenue went up and my living conditions improved, my life contracted.

When I wake up in the morning, I’m a little disappointed.

Ah. Today is starting again.

I think that, then look at the numbers on Instagram or YouTube to wake myself up.

I get out of bed and make coffee alone in a room with no one in it.

There are University of Tokyo past exams lying in the room.

Come to think of it, the future where I go to university is gone too.

“What do you think about university at twenty-six?”

“I think you should do whatever you want to do.”

Because that’s what I was told, I did what I wanted.

But the moment that person was gone, I turned into a realist overnight.

I could only do what I wanted because there were people around me. So maybe it’s about time I got married, or—

Why is it that when that person was here I never thought about marriage, and now I do?

Partly because of that, I’ve recently taken an employed job alongside the business.

By any measure I’m shaping up into a proper member of society.

I have no money worries, I live in an ordinary apartment, and now and then I go into Tokyo to buy clothes.

I changed hair salons too.

I liked the one out in the countryside in Kisarazu.

Nobody else was ever there, the room was quiet, and time moved slowly.

Now I get my hair cut in Jingūmae, in Omotesandō.

I don’t know why I stopped going to the salon in Kisarazu.

Only that if I kept going there, I’d be reminded of all the people who were “that person” to me.

I don’t know which is happier, when I was homeless or now.

When I was homeless there was no me, but everything else was there around me.

There was also a future: I want to live in a house.

Now there’s no future.

Much of what I wanted back then, I have.

But for any of it to work as a condition for happiness, that person has to be there — and that’s the part that’s missing.

At night, when the work is finished and I get home, I open a drink right away.

Dinner has turned into potato chips and whatever snacks the convenience store has.

Drinking with YouTube playing in the background is my makeshift happiness now.

Once my stomach is a little full, I open the window and smoke.

All kinds of people pass on the road in front of the house.

People walking dogs, high school students, office workers.

Back when I lived in the industrial district, the only people I noticed were manual laborers.

That’s the kind of thing I remember.

When I was boxing I never touched alcohol or cigarettes.

Now that they function as a makeshift happiness, I drift toward them.

A year ago there were all kinds of people in my life, I was boxing, and my Instagram following was growing.

My body was in a bad way, but there were plenty of conditions for happiness.

Back then living was full of worry, and full of hope.

Now I have not one worry, and only emptiness follows me around.

If only the book hadn’t sold.

I catch myself thinking that.

Then no royalties would have come in, there’d have been no move, and that person might still be here.

I became a writer, and the book sold, and I lost something.

If you asked me whether I still want to be a writer, I don’t know.

All I can do is keep putting that not-knowing into words.

It’s the middle of September now, and at the end of the month the credit card payment comes out.

The bill is big.

I originally got the credit card to settle business expenses.

At some point it started paying for my living expenses instead.

I suspect people who can use a credit card rationally don’t have many troubles in life.

If only I could be rational about money, I think — but staying rational the moment money comes in seems, at this point, like a biological contradiction.

Why did I need to start a business in the first place?

Because last year I became homeless.

If you ask which was worse for money, then or now, honestly there isn’t much difference.

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This is hard. This is awful. I hate them.

But I’ve started to think those feelings mostly arrive after the terrible thing is over.

In 2025 I got out of homelessness.

I moved into a ¥30,000-a-month place on the Tokyo Bay side of Chiba.

If I compare how my body felt while I was homeless against how it felt once I moved into that place in Chiba — the second one, by a wide margin, was when the symptoms came.

When a person falls into a critical situation, the body seems to switch into something like emergency mode.

Maybe it’s a leftover from when we were animals.

If a predator is about to take you and you stop to consider is this situation bad?, you get eaten.

So the animal keeps only the senses survival requires, and temporarily numbs the rest — the other senses, the thinking.

In the same way, when I was living in the net café, the only thing I thought about was making it to tomorrow.

Once I was in the place in Chiba, that was no longer necessary.

I had a home.

And improbably, I’d started writing for readers overseas from inside that net café, and there was income now.

But the body wouldn’t come out of emergency mode.

When a person is pushed to the limit, sleep is the first thing to break.

In the net café I kept myself running on sleep in fragments.

Getting a home doesn’t mean the body starts sleeping.

Ironically, my body had been optimized for life in the net café.

Living in a house made things worse.

I couldn’t settle at home.

At home you’re forced to face your own existence whether you want to or not.

The place was so bare there was nothing to take my mind off it.

And when nothing takes your mind off it, the aftermath — that’s the only word for it — comes out, and slowly it gets harder to bear.

I went to cafés constantly. As if fleeing the house.

At the café I wrote, and I read. Mostly philosophy; back then I was deep in Heidegger.

I read Being and Time the way you check an answer key — against the discomfort of being in that house, against the unease of existing at all.

I still read a lot of philosophy, and it’s usually less out of pure interest than as an answer key for questions that came out of my own life.

But Heidegger didn’t get me out of the aftermath.

I’d finish working at the café and come home at night.

Night was the hardest hour for me in that house.

In the daytime the sun takes your attention off yourself.

At night, no matter how many lights I turned on, no matter what calming music I played, nothing beat the sun.

Come home at night, take my shoes off in the narrow entryway.

Coming home at night, the strength goes out of me all at once.

I suddenly need the bathroom.

I shower, I eat, and then there’s nothing left to do.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

It was true that part of me was relaxed, at home. And it was also true that my body still remembered the homeless months.

Those two selves, in a dark room, on the edge of splitting.

That fact frightened me.

And once the fear arrives, Instagram reels don’t distract me, YouTube doesn’t distract me.

So, fleeing that fear, I take a sleeping pill and go under.

Every night, without fail, I had nightmares.

I wake at four in the morning.

The sun is faintly there.

I see that light and I’m relieved.

Looks like I got away from the night.

Then it’s afternoon.

And in the afternoon I flee to the café.

I still don’t know what I was running from back then.

If I had to name it: the past.

I’m still running now, but there’s a sense that I’ve gotten away.

Writing this may also be a way of running.

They say summer in Japan is beautiful, but I get the feeling that depends on where you are.

Where I live it was cloudy or raining the whole time.

Every year when summer comes I think about going to a river or to the sea, and then mostly what happens is I walk to city hall in the heat, mutter “this summer is way too hot...”, and summer goes by.

This year was no exception.

Something of an incident happened at the start of August, and before I had a chance to feel summer at all, it was already the season where you don’t need the air conditioner.

Why is summer so hard to feel?

When the cicadas start up I feel summer for a second, but within a week of their starting, their crying becomes just another one of the sounds of daily life.

Recommended travel spots come through my Instagram feed, and I save them for later.

“Maybe I’ll go with that person,” I think — but “that person” is busy, or doesn’t exist in the first place.

So those travel spots stay buried in my saved folder.

It would be nice if there were a river or a sea nearby, but there’s nothing around my place except the Sōbu Line and the shopping complex over the station, so summer is hard to run into.

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A lot has been going on in my private life lately, so I haven’t been posting.

There were good things and bad things, but in the end it’s moving in a positive direction.

The truth is, my partner and I broke up.

We had been together since before I started doing what I do now, so they mattered to me a great deal.

So when it ended, it felt like the foundation of my life had collapsed, and I came to hate all of it — boxing, writing, university.

But I’m fine now.

I did get down, of course. But I’ve been through much worse things in the past, so with a breakup I only get down about as much as anyone would.

So I have a little confidence now, too.

Looking back, I started to think that the reason I used to be mentally unstable was simply that the load on my life was too high.

So as long as I’m just living an ordinary life, I don’t really get depressed.

Right now I’m back at my family’s house in Tokyo.

Looking at the river, hanging out with old friends, looking at nature. It heals me.

And when that happens, the things that had been pressing down on me get taken away, and all kinds of new ideas start coming up.

Lately I’ve started making animation, as an extension of the drawing I’ve always done.

It’s my first time, so it’s hard, but it’s fun.

Somehow it feels like the passion I had when I first started illustrating.

Just between us, I’m planning to make a music video, so please look forward to it.

But learning animation costs money.

The other day I went and bought a ¥20,000 course...

This is bad.

I have no choice but to agree.

Carrying various “aftereffects,” I had to endure them.

And while enduring them, I had to deal with everything else life kept dropping on me.

What troubled me most back then was money.

Why does the human race run out of money at twenty-five?

Maybe not twenty-five exactly, but a lot of people seem to hit a financial crisis somewhere in their twenties.

Your twenties are the bridge from child to adult, and somewhere along the way, a “molting” happens.

In 2025, I went through a painful “molting” of my own.

At the time I still had the title of illustration YouTuber, and that was how I made my living.

Having gotten out of the internet café, I rented a run-down place in an industrial district of Chiba, and I had to pay the rent on it.

I thought about getting a part-time job, but my autonomic nervous system was out of balance, and the chronic depression wouldn’t allow it.

With no other choice, I leaned on welfare for exactly one year.

My viewers didn’t approve, and the criticism came in all forms.

“If someone is in trouble, help them.”

That kind of common sense, the kind you’re taught in elementary school ethics class, had no power where I was concerned.

If anything, what interested me was: why do people attack someone who’s in trouble?

Digging into that question, I came across a philosopher named Hannah Arendt.

I applied myself to studying philosophy rather than to finding a job.

The problems I had would mostly have been solved by working part-time at the convenience store in front of my house.

Instead, I tried to solve them with the goal of going to university to study philosophy.

A person in a “molting” period does very strange things like this.

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When I was twenty-one, I watched Attack on Titan and Neon Genesis Evangelion. I was so moved that I decided to draw illustrations of Rei Ayanami and Mikasa Ackerman.

I installed a drawing app on an old, worn-out iPad I had at home and searched YouTube for “how to draw illustrations.”

I watched a few videos and just started drawing.

I drew a Rei Ayanami so bad that, if I turned it into a Shorts video today, it would probably get canceled, and proudly uploaded it to Instagram.

By the way, it was just my private account.

And yet I wrote “illustrator” in my profile.

Ironically, I’m much more of an illustrator now than I was back then, but I no longer have the confidence to call myself one.

Drawing starts with learning how to draw a straight line.

Even after four years, whenever I try to draw a straight line on my iPad, I end up mass-producing something that looks like earthworms.

So I’m still not sure whether I deserve to call myself an illustrator.

But none of that mattered back then.

I posted terrible drawings with complete confidence.

Whenever I start something new, I fall in love with it.

I can’t think about anything else.

It becomes the center of my world.

Looking back, I think I was in love with drawing.

One day I turned my practice into a Shorts video.

The title was:

“What happened after a complete beginner finished three sketchbooks.”

It reached one million views.

That was the beginning of my honeymoon.

I became convinced that I had talent.

I drew all the time.

I couldn’t get enough of it.

Then one day I made another Shorts video.

“What happened after that beginner drew every day for 1,500 days.”

That video ended my honeymoon.

I opened the comments.

My stomach sank.

“That’s all after 1,500 days…”

It felt like drawing had dumped me.

I deleted my YouTube channel.

I said goodbye to drawing.

Like someone throwing away everything that belonged to an ex.

In the summer of 2024, with a hole left in my heart, I started boxing.

I was twenty-three, almost twenty-four.

There wasn’t any particular reason.

I impulsively called a nearby gym and signed up for a trial session.

The first time I walked into the gym, I saw a heavy bag.

I was fascinated.

I punched it with my bare hand.

It started bleeding.

The head coach looked at me with concern—half worried, half exasperated—and handed me a bandage.

Now heavy bags are just part of everyday life.

Now I put on my worn-out gloves and spend the first round throwing mostly jabs.

The heavy bag no longer excites me.

By the way, punching it barehanded messes up your distance, so apparently you’re better off wearing gloves.

Why was I so excited by a heavy bag that day?

Probably because I had found another lover.

For the first year of boxing, I felt invincible.

In reality, becoming a boxer means learning your stance, running every day, doing technical sparring before real sparring, and then surviving dozens of rounds of sparring.

But I didn’t know any of that.

I just hit the heavy bag and believed I was the strongest.

Then my honeymoon ended without warning.

In boxing, there’s sparring, where you actually hit each other, and there’s technical sparring, where you stop your punches.

Once you learn the basics, you start technical sparring.

At the time, I thought I was unbeatable.

So I asked a professional boxer to spar with me.

He was kind.

He barely attacked.

He simply extended his glove slowly toward my face.

A few minutes later, one light jab touched me.

That was enough.

My honeymoon ended again.

I felt the texture of the glove.

I felt how hard a professional’s fist really was.

The world I thought I understood cracked apart.

I had believed I was the strongest.

Yet a single touch filled me with a fear I couldn’t describe.

After the session, we went to Starbucks together.

I couldn’t hear a word he was saying.

I was still overwhelmed by the feeling of his fist.

A few days later, I quit the gym.

Another lover had left me.

The world that revolved around boxing collapsed.

I didn’t know what to do.

Then I found philosophy.

This time, I fell in love with philosophy.

I don’t know whether I’m simply incapable of learning, or whether falling in love over and over again is simply part of being human.

Back then I had quit the gym and was living in an internet café.

Life wasn’t exactly going well.

I was full of frustration toward society.

As I kept asking,

“Why?”

“Why?”

I encountered Hannah Arendt.

Now I’d probably interrupt myself and say,

“Strictly speaking, Hannah Arendt wasn’t a philosopher but a political thinker…”

But back then, anyone who thought about difficult things was simply a philosopher to me.

I read The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition.

I barely understood them.

But somehow I was deeply moved.

Partly because I had managed to finish such thick, difficult books.

Partly because I could feel something like anger flowing through her writing.

I immediately decided to become a philosopher.

After reading exactly two books, I thought I understood philosophy.

Now I’ve studied everything from Ancient Greece to phenomenology.

And I realize I understand almost nothing.

If I entered a university philosophy department today, I’d probably be crushed.

But back then I still felt invincible.

So I wrote a paper.

If I remember correctly, it argued that Arendt’s concept of the public sphere isolates the individual.

I genuinely believed this paper would shake Japan.

So I emailed it to every philosophy professor I could find.

I received exactly zero replies.

I didn’t give up.

I attended a philosophy dialogue event hosted by one professor.

If I got lucky, I thought, maybe I could hand him my paper.

Instead, my third honeymoon ended.

I couldn’t understand a single thing he was saying.

“Epoché.”

“Cogitatio.”

“Cogitatum.”

These words flew around as though everyone was obviously supposed to know them.

The audience seemed to understand too.

Without realizing it, I had wandered into a discussion on phenomenology without even knowing phenomenology existed.

The only cards in my hand were Arendt and Spinoza.

I couldn’t hand over my paper.

I quietly escaped.

It felt like philosophy had dumped me too.

That was when I finally realized something.

Maybe I—

or maybe all human beings—

lose our objectivity whenever we begin something new.

We’re terrible, yet we believe we’re geniuses.

We feel as though we were born for that one thing.

Just like someone experiencing first love who can’t stop talking about their partner, we can’t stop talking about our new obsession.

But nothing hurts quite like the end of that honeymoon.

You can’t accept that your talent was only an illusion.

When my honeymoon with drawing ended, I spent a year heartbroken.

Boxing took six months.

Philosophy took three.

But eventually, I got back together with all of them.

I’m unquestionably better at drawing now.

But instead of showing off to my friends, I quietly post an Instagram Story showing my iPad screen full of earthworm-like lines.

Even if someone tells me,

“You’re really good.”

I immediately think,

“Yeah, but my perspective falls apart whenever I draw a full body…”

I do the same with boxing.

Even after getting headaches from sparring, I return to the gym the next day and hit the heavy bag.

If someone tells me,

“Your shadowboxing looks great.”

I think,

“Yeah, but my guard still drops on the jab-hook, so I’d get countered…”

I do it with philosophy too.

Now I read original texts.

I’ve even reached the point where I genuinely enjoy Critique of Pure Reason.

But I still think,

“Yeah… but I can’t read the German original, and my understanding of the Antinomies…”

Maybe these little inspectors exist to stop me from ever entering another honeymoon.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with Bach.

Sometimes I want to tell people,

“I’ve really been enjoying Gould’s Bach lately…”

But I know that’s how another honeymoon begins.

So instead, I quietly play Richter’s BWV 853 at night.

And that’s enough.

Still…

I think being able to enter that honeymoon is, in its own way, happiness.

First love is beautiful precisely because it’s your first.

Sometimes I think the excitement I felt the first time I saw a heavy bag may have been greater than the excitement I’ll feel after winning a sparring match.

That’s how precious first experiences are.

Even the collapse that comes when the honeymoon ends is part of what makes them beautiful.

Split — Five Essays is out today.

Five essays, published one at a time over the summer, now in one volume: Split, Escape, Aftermath, Molting, Loss. In that order.

The night before a move. What stays behind after something ends. A molting. What got lost once it was over.

36 pages. PDF, ¥3,800 — about $26, and your card does the conversion. It arrives the moment you pay.

https://miyamavoid.shop/products/split-five-essays-ebook

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“Time has stopped in March, and still I have no choice but to live in September.”

Imprint is a new short essay, out today.

It started with a lake I saw in March 2026. Back then I ran every day, I was still on welfare, I took sleeping pills to get through the night, and the people around me felt like the most important people of my life. Then everything got easier. I moved, my health came back, the money anxiety went away — and the person who mattered was gone.

The essay is about what a strong experience carves into you, why a good memory can torment you the way trauma does, and why I keep setting out to make new ones anyway.

A typeset PDF, five pages. About a four-minute read. Pay what you want, from $9:

https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/imprint

Patrons get everything I write, from $5/month:

https://www.patreon.com/miyama921

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Two essays I hadn’t published anywhere until today. Neither is in the books. Both are short — about five minutes each — and both are on Gumroad, pay what you want from $9.

Molting is about the year after the net café: a run-down room in an industrial district of Chiba, a year on welfare, and studying for the University of Tokyo entrance exam at four in the morning instead of taking the job at the convenience store across the street. “During a ‘molting’ period, a person stops being human for a while.”

https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/molting

Money was written this week, with the credit card bill due at the end of the month. It asks which money trouble is worse — having none, or having to be rational about it — and ends with a part-time job that starts at eight in the morning. “With freedom, money trouble never ends. With money, freedom disappears.”

https://voidmiyama.gumroad.com/l/money

Everything else has moved to the shop. The books, in paperback and PDF, and the prints are at https://miyamavoid.shop — Gumroad now carries only the short pieces: these two, and That Person and Summer.

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