Rigby

Every generation has things that cannot be said, and it is usually followed by a generation that says them as often and as loudly as possible. Sex, drugs, violence, deviance; all the things that were once whispered secretly about - that once caused books, and sometimes people, to be burnt - are now topics that are invited, celebrated, rewarded and shouted from the rooftops. There is no type of sex we haven't read about; there is no drug that hasn't been documented by somebody like Irvine Welsh. And so we take the things that could not be said by the people before us, and we say them until the silence stops.

But wherever there is a hole, something else will always come to fill it. And in this generation - a generation where people collect Facebook friends like stamps, and fill their parties with strangers, and know 600 people by first name and barely anyone by last; a generation where we have a million hobbies, and date a million people, and have a million jobs - the thing that cannot be said - the thing that generations before us admitted happily - is: I am lonely. Because, to this generation, it means: I have failed. It means: I am unloved. It means: in this life of constant building, and collecting, and presenting - like a giant set of lego - I didn't do it well enough. And my pieces are not enough, or scattered all over the room.

I am lonely.

I am the kind of lonely that is built into some people; the kind of lonely that finds you sitting in a corner of the playground at the age of five, when nobody sits with you and you don't know why. I am the kind of lonely that is lonely even when I'm not alone, and seeks to be alone even if I'm lonely. And, right now, I am the kind of lonely that is living in a bedsit in a country where I do not speak the language, in the middle of nowhere, with no family near and few friends, and only five year olds and strangers on the train to talk to. And I am - and have been since I got here - the kind of lonely that is a massive hole in the middle of you, where the person you are in love with is gone, or always going, or always somewhere else, and you feel lonely without them, even in a crowd full of people. The kind of lonely that happens because you've found somebody who - after a lifetime - finally makes the loneliness go away, and when they leave you or love you less or not at all it makes the loneliness even harder to bear and the hole inside you ache worse because at last you know how it feels when it doesn't.

I am a million types of lonely, and it's the one thing I have not been able to say. It's the one thing I have been too ashamed to write. Because it's too many types of lonely, and it's too many types of failure. And it's admitting that I need people, when I never thought I did.

I love Japan - I love the people, I love the children I teach, I love the culture, I love the craziness and I love the photo booths and toys and shoes and mobile phone accessories - but it is not where I belong. And so I'm going home, to decide where my next adventure will be. It might not make me any less lonely, and it might not be where I belong, but at least by leaving and starting again somewhere new, I will be one step closer to finding out where is.