It’s graduation season for a lot of seniors in high school and college. Recently, I saw a lot of college seniors in their gallant robes on my commutes. It got me thinking about their youth, their potential dreams, and what they will have to face in the real world.

I then listened to something I heard that I wish young adults would appreciate - find hobbies that you never monetize.

When I first started this blog a long time ago, I had some thought in thinking about how to monetize my writing into something bigger. A friend even suggested I use things like Google AdSense for ad revenue. But over time, I felt that something wasn’t right. I put in so much work and I didn’t seem to get the financial opportunities I wanted with regards to manga.

Over time, I realized that doing something I love as a job isn’t always worth it. I did get a paid opportunity with regards to fandom once, but I realized that despite my passion, I wasn’t really willing to grind for it or as passionate as I thought I was. (Note: being passionate about 1 series in a genre DOES NOT make you passionate about the entire genre.)

What’s interesting now is that there’s more jobs for anime and manga than ever before. But as someone might tell you, working in a field you’re passionate about isn’t for everyone. If you’re not good at what you do no matter how hard you work, all the passion will go away. Work is still work even if it can get fun at times.

That’s why I say it’s okay to have hobbies as hobbies. I know a lot of young people are pressured to find their passion. Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life, as the saying goes. A lot of that advice is well-intended, but it’s not contextualized to fit every person’s needs/wants. I also think that being “good enough” isn’t emphasized enough.

That’s why I love this advice given from an episode of It’s Going to Be OK to high school graduates about hobbies. Credit for these words goes to Caroline Moss, host of Gee Thanks, Just Bought It.

“Cultivate hobbies that make you happy and then do not try to monetize them. You’re gonna hear a lot of people tell you to do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

These people are lying to you. Capitalism is a non-stop grind. If you can’t divest from it completely and 100 percent of people cannot, find things that make you happy, hobbies that you enjoy, and then do them when you can, even if you’re bad at them, especially if you’re bad at them. Do not collect a dime from these hobbies and don’t even daydream about it.

Just enjoy doing something for the sake of enjoying it. It’s actually way harder than it sounds.”

I know there’s some manga folks who are having fun with Twitter and being able to get connections with industry folks. It’s cool and rewarding, but they all have regular jobs outside of manga for the most part. And I like to tell you that even when manga professionals are fans living their dreams and having fun at their jobs, they may tell you that the job nature of it all is super-stressful at times and they have non-monetized interests to help keep them sane.

I’ll use myself as an example of being interested in hobbies with thinking about money - K-Pop has been a new thing of mine since last year and I’ve been doing girl group dances with no desire to get better. I just want to have fun. I don’t want to be a part of a dance crew. I don’t want to be in a talent show. I relish being an amateur and listening to K-Pop has been a lift in exploring myself more as I get older.

I hate this push by Western people who think everything is all about money. It’s sad and no wonder why so many people are depressed or anxious. We work to live, not live to work.

So if you love to draw fan art, write fanfiction, do YouTube videos, write essays about your favorite media, stream, etc., do it because you love the hell out of it. If you want to make money off of it, do it because you actually want to and have the growth mindset to do so, not because someone told you to. If one day you get burned out from your hobbies, it’s okay to take a break. No one minds at all, believe me.

Hobbies are supposed to bring you joy and much-needed self-reflection. Nothing kills those important things faster than society’s view that you have to be productive and efficient in everything you do.

Kids, always be a fan of what you love and more importantly, be a fan of yourself first and foremost.

I got to spend some time with my mother yesterday for an early Mother’s Day celebration in New York City. Before then, I was in deep thought about something that happened to me about 23 years ago. It’s something I haven’t really talked about and it involved my mom to a huge degree.

I was once hospitalized because of my mental health issues and if it weren’t for my mom, I think my life would not be where it is right now for the better.

When I first got my diagnosis of clinical depression at the age of 17-18, I leaned into a bit too hard. Or more like I wanted to not do anything at all. One time at the first university I went to, I talked to a counselor and told them I heard voices. I mention this right now because now that I think about it, I don’t think I was really hearing them. I think it was just thoughts instead of voices.

But I leaned into the “hearing voices” motif a bit too hard. In 2001, a year after my diagnosis, I tried switching colleges and still felt out of it. I felt so depressed that I decided to get voluntarily hospitalized. I don’t know why I did it, but I was so worried I would kill myself. So off I went into a hospital. There I was surrounded by people much worse than me mentally. It also led to a pseudo-revelation - I don’t think I really had it that bad because I was actually optimistic during my time. I eventually was discharged after about a week as my mom fought to get me out with determination.

I thanked my mom yesterday for what she did in 2001. But the story didn’t end there. I found out that my mom fought hard because she personally saw what the hospital unit I was staying with was like. She saw the number of people with SMI (serious mental illness) and felt that I really shouldn’t be there. My mom told me she was horrified. She even told me that the doctors above were saying I was writing stuff that I wanted to kill/hurt others when that wasn’t true. My mom never believed what they said. She was worried that doctors would drug me and force me into bad treatment solutions. She said she signed a release form saying she would take full responsibility for me if things went south (spoiler alert: they didn’t, even though I did have a close call).

As some of you who follow this blog know, I’ve been more critical about what constitutes as mental health care. I’ve been listening to perspectives from people with mental health conditions who get hospitalized and end up worse after. People who are supposed to help didn’t/couldn’t do their jobs. We got a hotline number, great. But a lot of people don’t know the full truth about how broken the mental health system really is behind closed doors.

And I think about the statement “It’s okay to not be okay.” I dislike that statement because if that were the case, then we wouldn’t be throwing a lot of the mentally ill into jails, prisons, and/or the streets. Certain mental issues (bipolar disorder/schizophrenia/psychosis/etc.) sadly are ignored.

I could have been one of those people if it weren’t for my mom. I know I stressed her a lot and feel like I haven’t done enough. But she has seen how much I’ve grown mentally over the last few years. I strongly have been questioning my own response to my circumstances decades ago as a mental illness. I don’t want to pretend that ignoring trauma/vulnerability/dependency is going to make me stronger. My mom has noticed this.

I have a lot of empathy and good amount of compassion from my experiences, but I believe some of it came from my mother. I noticed how many friends she has and how she’s helped various people over the years.

I know some of you have all kinds of thoughts about Mother’s Day, but for me, I’m lucky to have the mother that I have. Someone who allowed me to be myself, stuck with me through my bullshit, and saved a naive version of me who didn’t know that they needed to be saved.

I hope you all have someone like that in your life because even as we get older and wiser (I’ll use recent events of My Hero Academia as an example), we’re still all children deep inside who need maternal love of some kind to truly make us flourish. Mothers are the real heroes we truly need.

So this week I found out out a Japanese start-up called Orange, who wants to be the Netflix of manga by translating a lot of manga with new apps and tools for the world to fight against online piracy. And to do so, the company will use AI to machine translate all of their manga into English. They also received $20 million USD in funding (one of their investors is Shogakukan) for their goal. This company wants to release up to 500 titles a month at some point.

I honestly don’t know how to feel about this.

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I started reading Chica Umino’s March Comes In Like a Lion after years of hearing about its great outlook on characters dealing with a variety of emotional issues. In particular, its main character, Rei Kiriyama and his struggles to come to terms with his past involving a surrogate parental figure who raised him after his family died, but ignored their own kids for the sake of Rei’s future.

I see this first hand near the end of the 1st volume when Rei reminisces about the past and how he got into shogi.

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It’s scary that I felt the same as Rei about 13 years ago. I remember one time where I felt like I was dragging my family down a hell hole when we moved into a new living situation. I was dealing with so much uncertainty and didn’t know how to handle it. I think at the time, we had limited resources. I felt that I was selfish because I wanted to move to a better place badly over everyone else’s preferences, but my sister reminded me that I wasn’t the only one who wanted out. She even said my thinking was warped. I think I was just so afraid of hurting my family and felt they had to do so much for my depression. I wanted them to stop helping me. I felt like a cuckoo despite not actually being a cuckoo.

When I look back at that time now, I realized that I was facing a new situation that I was overreacting to. It’s fine to react in ways that make you fearful, but there’s a point where it affects your relationships in not-so-healthy ways. You have to be realistic and trust in the people around you despite what your inner critic says.

Rei’s quote about being a bird and free of emotional pain reminded me of my experiences with birds. I used to have a pet African finch and felt that he had it much easier than me. He got to eat, sing, fly around, sleep, poop, etc. And then I remember my finch lived in a cage and was taken care of by creatures (i.e. human beings) that he can’t exactly communicate with. There’s no freedom for him here. And even if my finch was free and roaming, he would have to deal with how vicious wild birds are due to being domesticated. My finch died in 2019 after 11 years of raising him and while I do think he lived a long life for his kind, I have to be careful in saying he lived a good life.

After my finch died, I later discovered an avian center that housed birds of all kinds that were on display while walking on a lunch break from work. There were a variety of them living in a special housing display for everyone to see. All of them were either injured, old, and/or couldn’t be raised by regular folks. I had a lot of joy looking at those birds and would walk by to see them almost all the time. Some of them did die over time, but the birds reminded me how important it is to recognize that we deserve people to care for us when life deals us a terrible hand. I still stop by the avian center bird display because all the birds there are precious to me.

I sometimes wished I was a bird because it sucks being sad a good amount. It sucks to cry when you least expect it. And then I think about what that actually will entail. I don’t want to anthropomorphize animals because it’s hard to compare.

The grand truth is that everyone and everything (humans/animals/plants) goes through pain in some fashion. We decay and wither from time to time. That’s how life works. Obviously, some pain isn’t worth it. But I feel that we have to appreciate to a certain degree how we learn who we really are through our rough experiences. They make us value what’s important in our lives. Despite whatever gaslighting we may get, we can get through the pain and/or live with it in healthy ways.

I will say that one thing I notice about birds is that they’re usually together a lot. During the 1st year of COVID, I saw a family of mourning doves living in the back of my place for a short time. It was one of the cutest things I ever saw. The parents would fly away to look for food, while the kids parked themselves at their temporary home. I don’t know how they’re doing now, but I like to think that they’re doing okay out there. Whenever I see families of mourning doves, I think of that one family.

Maybe a part of me still wants to be a bird - soaring into the air and being out in nature, free of modern life constraints. The real cuckoo isn’t me; it’s those who want us to ignore the interdependence of all things that truly makes human beings feel that they matter.

If you ever feel like you’re a cuckoo, it’s not your fault. You’re a person who deserves the unconditional foundation to live a life full of love to process the pain you unfortunately had to deal with.

Much like what the manga seems to entail, springtime is a time to renew yourself with others around, whether human or animal, after the harshness of winter.

I sometimes struggle with two things - dwelling on the past a bit too much and wondering if I’m cool enough for my friends.

After reading the Futatsume Debut arc in Akane-banashi, I started to feel a little different about my struggles. Especially after seeing the following scenes in Chapters 96 and 97 of the manga.

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The initial premise of the series involved Akane Arakawa’s father, Shinta Arakara, being expelled from the rakugo scene. He ends up being a regular salesman, but is moving forward. That’s the most important thing. It’s okay if you feel like you can’t move on from bad stuff that happened. But definitely take steps to go forward. They don’t have to be big ones as long as you do it.

Plus I feel like we tend to overvalue super-bad experiences involving other people especially if we’re on the receiving end of them. We think that life as we know it is over. But you know what, those experiences tend to help us grow and learn. They also make you more resilient than you think.

Life situations changing dramatically doesn’t mean it will turn out bad. They can go in either direction, but I like to think that we got this somehow. I’ve always felt that I couldn’t move forward from certain experiences, but here I am enjoying life for what it’s worth still.

The scene featuring Akane and her friends is relatable. I do believe that we get anxious over how we truly fit in with others in the world. We want people to like us, but we’re afraid to show our vulnerabilities. Sometimes, we are a bit much. Akane is the definition of someone who can be a bit much. I know I act like her at times. It’s okay though. Akane’s friends are telling her that she’s already enough. That’s because Akane is so comfortable in her own skin that she should just be herself during rakugo.

Sometimes, being ourselves can drive other people away. But it definitely attracts other people who will genuinely appreciate you. As I said earlier, it goes both ways. I continue to learn this as I continue to meet new people in my life.

And if you’re going to be moving forward while being more natural, definitely do it with a smile. That’s what will make you look really cool and take on life’s challenges.