Sniffling at the last few dregs of my dying cold, I realised that I'm not in Japan to have my heart broken or fixed, or to learn a new language, or to teach children. I'm not in Japan to eat rice balls, or to spend the majority of my time converting yen into pounds and back into yen again in my head, or attaching small, cute and sparkly things to my phone and handbag and purse and keys. I'm not in Japan to learn how to eat food I don't like, and I'm not even in Japan to experience a new culture, or meet new people, or see new things. Those things are important, and will be done - and are being done - but they're not the reason I'm here, even if they were the reason I came. It all became suddenly clear to me this evening as I rinsed out my butter pot and put it carefully in my 'plastics' bin so that it could be recycled properly on Tuesday when the nice men come and pick up my rubbish.
For the first time in my life, I am living on my own. I'm not living with a boyfriend, I'm not living with flatmates, I'm not living with friends, I'm not living with my parents. For the first time in my life, there is nobody cooking for me, nobody paying the bills and then writing down my share of them on the back of a Sainsburys' receipt and circling it in blue, and then circling it again in blue, and then circling it in red and leaving a shitty note next to it. There's nobody cleaning up my mess or telling me to clean up my mess, nobody telling me when to get up or when to go to bed, or whether I should go out or stay in or watch tv or go dancing or eat more vegetables or eat less chocolate. The washing up is my washing up; the toothpaste all over the sink is my toothpaste; the toothbrush lying in the toothpaste all over the sink is my toothbrush; the electricity that they are threatening to shut off (at least, I think that's what they doing: all the Kanji is in red, anyway) will be my lack of electricity. If I don't wash my duvet cover it starts to smell, and if I drop my underwear in a pile on the floor, it's bloody well still there when I get up the next morning.
I came all the way to Japan for a culture shock that I could have got in a bedsit in Stoke on Trent, because it's not about the language or the food or the fashion or the random earthquakes. It's simply that, for the first time in nearly twenty eight years, I have been forced - for the sake of sanitary survival - to stop thinking and acting and living like a child.
It's a painful realisation. Seven weeks of skidding around my new life like Bambi on ice - breaking things and burning things and dropping things and trying to work out how to use a rice cooker and a washing machine and an air conditioner, and sulking and crying and moaning in the process - and it was all because I am, basically, a spoilt, lazy little kid who hasn't got a clue how to change the bag in a vacuum cleaner because if I leave it long enough then usually somebody else will do it for me. Twenty eight, and the most important thing learnt from working with small children is that I still behave exactly like them.
So that's what the butter tub told me. As I carefully rinsed it - remembering, now (unbelievably, with all the freshness of a new realisation) that if I didn't, it would leak all over my floor and then I would just have to spend longer cleaning it up - I suddenly became aware that I was doing something incredibly adult. That I was doing something unreasonably boring that I didn't want to do, because it was the responsible thing to do and would save me time in the long run. And that I was doing something - anything - without the ingrained and utterly innate conviction, somewhere deep inside of me, that somebody else might do it for me. And it wasn't the first thing I'd done, either. I'd paid my gas bill on the way to work. I'd put money in my piggy bank instead of spending it all on pretty little notepads and cheesecake. I'd even hung my clothes out to dry and then remembered to take them back in again before it rained and they all stank like dog. I'd started growing up already, and I hadn't even realised it. I'd just noticed that my bedding smelt a lot nicer.
Being adult isn't a lot of fun: not at this stage, anyway. The boring stuff seems to take up an awful lot of time: almost all of it, in fact. But I've realised that that's why I'm here, and why I should stay. Because - before I head off into the backpacking paradise of Asia (which is just a playground for other spoilt kids like me who don't like washing up) - I need to learn how to be an adult, like all the other adults out there who are nearly thirty years old. I need to pack away the bit of my brain that still wants to sit on the sofa and throw biscuit wrappers at the bin from six feet away, or - at the very least - insert a new bit of brain that tells me to go and pick them up again afterwards. And I need to learn how to fend for myself, instead of hoping that somebody will come and save me and I won't have to.
After all - as with anything - if I can just learn the rules of adulthood well enough, then I can start breaking them again. But, when I decide to leave the washing up for three days because it's my goddamn washing up and I have better things to do, at least now I'll know that I'm being a kid about it.
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