When I say I'm neither American nor Japanese, people commonly respond to this by saying that I'm a real American now, and therefore should not feel lonely. Some people go as far as to tell me that what makes this country great is its willingness to accept people like me. 11)Be that as it may, they are assuming that I want to belong, especially to America since it is where I live now, but I don't care to belong to any particular country. This is not to say that I never feel lonely or insecure. Loneliness is a natural feeling. So is insecurity. We all feel it from time to time, but that does not mean that it needs to be fixed. We have a mechanical tendency to try to fix everything negative, but not every negative thing needs to be fixed. Science and technology have blown up our egos to the point that we feel there is a solution for everything negative, that we have no reason to feel anything negative, that we can do away with every negative feeling. When I see these people who are constantly running around trying to fix their negative feelings, I feel like telling them to calm down, that it is only on TV and in Hollywood movies that people attain eternal bliss, that it is perfectly normal to be feeling what they are feeling, and that they should stop fixing everything. Ironically most of these people are busy fixing unfixable problems, and don't even try to fix fixable problems.
Life has a funny way of teaching us its 12)essences. Often it is our own struggles that make us struggle. Eventually we realize that the 13)footprints of the 14)crook that we have been chasing are our own. Only by stepping back and examining our own behaviors, can we see the big circle that we were going around and around. In my 20's, that is all I did. Around and around, until I realized that the pursuit of the sense of belonging was what was making me feel lonely and insecure.