1. I had never dated anyone before, nor had I any experience sexually. I didn't even really have any experience being a functioning member of society.
2. But at age 28, on a midday afternoon in May, 2015,
3. I sat cowering before an older lesbian prostitute.
1. My familiarity with sex was the same level as any newborn coming into the world for the first time.
2. "Ufufu..."
3. "......"
4. To be honest, I was well beyond having any sexual feelings for the woman in front of me.
5. "Take a look."
6. I had this bald spot on my scalp (though I was making attempts to hide it).
7. There were also the self-inflicted cuts lined up neatly along my arms, but it was no use trying to hide those.
1. I've never kissed anyone before.
2. Naturally, it's my first time with a prostitute.
3. I don't know where I'm supposed to go to pay after we're done.
4. My first time in a love hotel, too.
5. She's actually doing it...
6. Ah! They do this all the time in doujinshi.
1. "Ah, ahh...?"
2. "This... might be..."
3. "Mnh..."
4. This is my story, over ten years.
5. And to search out whatever 'sweet nectar' it is that'll let me find out how to be a grown-up.
6. Here, so that I can learn to accept myself, and carry on living...
7. And how it all ended up.
8. Why I'd suddenly resolved to come and hire a prostitute in the first place,
1. Ten years ago.
2. I can remember when the pain started.
3. I happily graduated from my safe and peaceful high-school,
4. "...Guess i'll quit."
5. Left university after half a year...
6. I'd developed depression and an eating disorder.
7. ...and when I came to,
1. "In regards to the part-time job offer, and..."
2. "Hello, yes... I noticed your advertisement in the paper,"
3. Losing that "something I belong to" and "a place to go every day" made me incredibly anxious.
4. And that now they'd been pulled out from under me, I'd dissolve into the air and disappear forever.
7. Back then I'd thought the "something I belong to" and the "place to go every day" was all I was.
8. Everyone I worked with was so lovely,
9. I started working part-time six days a week as soon as I could.
10. "Maybe that'd fill my heart right up, and make everything better again?" I thought to myself.
11. "Wouldn't it be nice, if we could all be like family to each other?"
1. my abscences, lateness and early departures from work started causing problems for the manager.
3. But as my mental and physical health started deteriorating,
4. "If we don't have any use for you here, you're gone, understand?"
5. "You're not in school anymore."
6. I must be misunderstanding something about this place...
7. "Aah."
8. Nor just how badly I was mistaken.
9. But back then I still didn't understand what I was missing in the first place.
1. "Excuse me!"
3. Looking back, it seems obvious.
4. "Sorry, do you mind if I leave early?"
5. What I wanted in a workplace was "somewhere I belonged, which would accept me whatever happened".
6. They're places people go to receive wages in exchange for services rendered.
7. Of course, workplaces aren't really anything like that at all.
8. I would have to look elsewhere for "somewhere I belonged, which would accept me whatever happened."
9. "I need somewhere to belong!!"
10. "Let me belong here~!!"
11. No place for someone who couldn't work for her wage.
1. In any case, I didn't feel I had any right to eat when I wasn't hungry.
2. "My legs were this weird, gross shape."
3. Incidentally, my height at the time was 167cm, and my weight was 38kg.
4. Some I still have today, and there are probably a bunch I haven't noticed yet.
5. "I don't have the right to eat out. (?)"
6. "I can't buy cake..."
7. "I'm sure, I'll be punished for that, won't I..."
8. Other items on my list of 'Things I don't have any right to be doing, which I'll surely receive some terrible retribution for...'
9. "I'm so scared..."
10. "It'd ruin everything, I'd never recover..."
12. "After I'd turned 20."
13. "I don't have any right to drink alcohol."
14. I was unusually weak to cold, and sometimes things I'd eat would badly upset my stomach.
15. "Cold!"
16. "Just standing next to a heater would burn me."
17. "My hands would get chapped, and start producing this weird yellow sweat."
18. Back then my skin was dry and rough. Cuts never seemed to heal, and I'd get frostbite as soon as the weather turned.
19. But I was happy to be so broken.
1. I thought this might be a way to find somewhere to belong,
2. When you're hurt, you get exempted from all kinds of things, and everyone's expectations of you are lowered to compensate.
3. nothing else even came close.
4. But aside from the kindness and sense of belonging I'd found in hospital beds,
5. had written something like this, and it really spoke to me.
6. "But when my body hurts it's so easy to grasp that it helps to calm me down."
7. "When my mind is hurting there's no shape or mark to look at, so I can't understand it very well."
8. Someone who had self-harmed,
9. Later in life,
10. It's much quicker and cleaner to make some visible 'dummy' pain. It helps you understand the cause and effect behind the pain inside you, and it can be reassuring to have physical marks to look at.
20. To actually put into words the mental pain that you're feeling inside, takes a lot of time and effort.
1. I figure this was just my body's hunger naturally kicking in, but...
2. Before long I'd made a complete switch from undereating to overeating.
3. I only managed to stay standing there through sheer force of determination.
4. At all times of the day, my brain would decide to give me these insane impulses to eat (overeating episodes) which I couldn't do anything to control.
5. "I can't leave the register..."
6. "I'm just going to use the bathroom! (lie)"
7. "Excuse me a minute,"
8. I would pretend to go to the toilet, and run to the changing room,
9. Just once would be enough for me, but I ended up doing this countless times.
10. "I've gotta get back, wahh! ahhh!"
11. and determinedly shove food into my mouth that'd been collected for being past its sell-by-date.
1. On the rare occasion,
2. When all that remained was cup ramen.
3. I didn't have time to add water and wait 3 minutes (I was technically still in work),
4. So I'd just eat them as they were.
5. "They taste like no-thing"
7. "You want to eat dry noodles that badly?"
8. Non-fry noodles were especially hard, so they'd be all stained with blood by the end.
9. Even the soup (powdered) would just slip through the gaps. I never learned the trick to eating them.
11. Bread and snacks were the easiest to eat, but made me feel like hell afterwards.
1. I figured if anyone saw me they'd think I was possessed or something.
2. (It was in a bag, so I didn't know what to do with the water)
3. As a last resort, I had some konnyaku stashed away in my locker.
4. My standing with them was getting worse and worse as the days went on.
5. "Sorry, sorry"
6. "You got me"
7. Experience had taught me that no matter how sneaky I tried to be, they'd find me out eventually.
8. Maybe that's the kind of feeling that led to what happened next.
9. Even ten years later, I still feel that fear of being trapped, unable to leave my work station, wondering what to do if I start to feel I have to run.
10. On my way out to work I froze, and crumpled down in the hallway unable to move my legs.
11. One cold morning, after around six months in this state...
1. They fired me the same day.
3. The only person at work I'd traded email addresses with.
4. "I left that konnyaku I was eating in my locker..."
5. "...."
6. "Ah, wait..."
7. "Ah..."
8. That day it was torn away from me, and I was tossed out into a dark and bitter space.
9. "Ah."
10. I'd lost one of my candidates for somewhere to belong.
1. "But there's no cup, dear."
2. "Hmm,"
3. Is like balancing a full cup of water on your head, and never being allowed to spill a single drop.
5. Being scared and anxious,
6. It never seemed like my parents had any interest in admitting that their daughter was sick.
10. I guess my parents were never given any slack either.
11. ...was what the doctors told me.
12. "Just go home and get some rest."
13. "Well,"
14. When I went to the hospital,
16. "Ehh!?"
17. "So i'm gonna stay here and rest for a while."
18. "The doctor told me to come home and get some rest,"
1. "Haven't you been resting this whole time...?"
2. that no matter how hard I actually tried, none of it would really mean anything.
3. I thought as long as other people didn't recognize how hard I was trying,
4. There are people who say that "when you reject one thing about me, I take it as a full rejection of me as a person".
5. I'm one of those three, or maybe all three. Yeah, that's me. I'm all of those.
6. Or maybe they'd take a specific person's rejection as a complete one.
7. Maybe they never thought their 100% was good enough to begin with,
8. Maybe they're already 95% anyway, and someone's just adding the final 5% rejection.
1. I don't want to cause any problems for friends and make them hate me.
2. Going to see relatives would just make things complicated, I can't do that.
3. I've nowhere to go.
4. It's like,
6. but for some reason I couldn't go anywhere.
7. I had money,
8. Apparently that was going to take more than just money.
9. Finding somewhere warm to belong...
1. For me to be able to enjoy the things I was eating, to look after my health and appearance, and to respect other people, and have them respect me.
2. I didn't know it then, but later in life I learned that this 'something' other than money was important in so many different ways.
3. So in the end I came home.
4. "What the fuck..."
5. I almost couldn't stand being near my parents, but after stamping out of the house, I couldn't help but run right back and cling to them.
6. I was disappointed in how pathetic and incapable I turned out to be.
7. In years to come, I would return to this line several times over.
8. "God, I just can't deal with you any more..."
9. "It's too much..."
11. "I don't know how I could possibly feel more disappointed with myself"
1. I also think people who are recovering at home have it bad too.
2. Overeating episodes
3. Anxiety
4. Depression
6. "Why are you doing this?"
7. "Stop!!"
8. "Don't eat so much!"
9. "Are they talking about me?"
10. "Ahhh... It'd be so much easier if I just died..."
11. People who are overeating have things a hell of a lot tougher than it might look at first glance.
12. But whenever I started to think of all the advantages that there were to dying, rather than carrying on...
13. "How should I do it?"
14. Every second of every hour of every day, it was tough and painful. Anyone would agree the best thing for me would've been to die.
15. It pissed me off more than I thought it would.
16. "What the fuck!!!"
17. "If I'm really that damn worthless,"
18. "I should die after I've struggled to get back up a little longer!"
19. ...I thought to myself.
