The Conscious Bridge

I remember back in college, in my career class, we were told to open LinkedIn accounts and think about our long‑ and short‑term goals. From there, we would figure out our career aspirations. I always found this exercise difficult. We were in our early twenties, buried in schoolwork, and we’d almost forgotten that another kind of obstacle waited after graduation.

My major fell under the umbrella of humanities, which was never my plan. In elementary school, I didn’t find school joyful at all. I only got As in Japanese (Kokugo), Art, and Music. The rest were… average. Math was the worst, lol.

But in high school, everything flipped. I was sent to Malawi alone—my parents stayed in Japan. I lived with my grandparents and eventually went to boarding school. They wanted me to learn their culture and English. The language switch wasn’t my choice. Suddenly math became the subject I could understand easily. I did well in the other sciences too. So, that means I should become a doctor, right? Chemistry was especially interesting—fewer words, more symbols. My ambition upgraded to geneticist, and I started skimming university websites to see where to apply.

That phase didn’t last long. I was told to return to Japan because my mom had survived cancer and needed support during her chemotherapy. I’m not complaining—then and now, I know it was the right move. But I learned quickly that my IGCSE certificate wasn’t enough for Japanese universities (especially the ones offering STEM courses in English). They required six years of secondary education. I only had five. The transitions I didn’t choose made everything harder. My priority changed overnight: I just needed higher education, without being picky about the major.

So I turned to American universities. In Japan, they’re notoriously known as “easy to enter, difficult to graduate.” (Japanese universities are the opposite: hard to enter, easy to graduate.) There were two in the Tokyo area. I applied to both. My English, shaped by exams in Malawi, meant I walked into the TOEFL without preparing much. I prepared my personal statement in about an hour. Gathering recommendation letters from high school took forever because of time zones. But in the end, I got into both and chose one.

Unfortunately, the Japan campus didn’t offer a Bachelor of Science. I started with Computer Science as my major. That turned out to be a mistake. I was bad at math again!

So International Affairs it was. I didn’t have a great reason for choosing it. But this time, many international and Japanese students were also working with English as a second language. I didn’t feel as insecure about my language abilities as I had in Malawi. That environment helped me focus on doing my best in the humanities.

Through all those twists, that question about long‑term goals felt less like a useful exercise and more like a joke. How do you look ten years ahead when you never know what next year will bring? I had basically survived schools in different countries without thinking about how any of it would build a career. When they asked, “What do you see yourself doing in three years?” I thought: I don’t know. I’ll find a job that helps me leave my parents’ house first. Then I’ll see. Ten years? Completely clueless. I just wished myself the best.

When I started navigating LinkedIn, trying to understand how to play the game, I realized early on: it’s about who looks most impressive, how you present yourself as successful, and how hard you work to make profit. Not my space to be, I thought. But I also knew I had to participate. I was starting my adult life in the age of social media. So I earned six credits from internships to add those experiences to the profile, ready to play the game myself.

When I started applying for jobs, I had to sell myself. I’m so good at organizing—you should see how clean I am at home! I’m confident in time management—I always did homework on time, sometimes a week before the deadline! Oh, and most importantly… I’m bilingual!

In Japan, new graduate employees are convenient for companies that want to invest in minds still willing to be shaped, starting costs kept low, and bodies young enough to endure. That’s when I understood what it meant to live in a capitalist society. I was the product, trying to convince older adults to give me a spot in the 9-to-5.

Fast forward ten years. My college self would be proud. I now have autonomy in my working style, thanks to the remote nature of my job. But I haven’t changed my mind about the game. I wouldn’t say I became good at it—kind of like how I played Street Fighter many times. I know all the characters. I know the stories. But winning was never the point for me. The problem was that everyone else was keeping score. I just had to accept that becoming rich isn’t something I can do. It’s not in my bones.

For a long time, I wondered if this mentality was a problem. Pursuing an impressive career by sacrificing your autonomy was something I never agreed with. But I also understood that this way of thinking doesn’t exactly serve you in Japan’s hustle culture. Still, looking back, I’m starting to think my messy path wasn’t a flaw. It was a sign that the framework itself was never built for someone like me—someone whose life kept getting redrawn by forces bigger than a career worksheet.

All my hardships made me empathetic, and I’m not willing to throw that away for material things. I’ve watched money rearrange people—those who became managers, paid more than everyone else, who only talked about quarterly targets, always stayed late, and criticized the people below them for not caring enough. The money didn’t free them. It just gave them new things to obsess over. When I was in Malawi, I watched an entire continent rich in resources still get labeled “poor” by the world. The wealth was there. It just kept moving into someone else’s hands. So when I look at money, I don’t see my path to freedom. I see the opposite.

Sometimes I think about being sent to Malawi alone as a child. The language switch, the boarding school, the years without my parents—none of that was my decision. I just wanted to be free. Free to make decisions for myself from the start. But what is freedom? Maybe it doesn’t begin with money at all. Maybe freedom starts with the mind.

Back in Malawi, I remember how workers would go home for lunch breaks that could last two hours—not because they were lazy, but because rest and a proper meal with family were treated as non‑negotiable parts of the day. I can imagine how easily that rhythm gets labeled as backward, inefficient, something that needs fixing. But I’m starting to understand that the labeling itself is the colonialism of the mind. The hustle, the grind, the pressure to prove your worth through exhaustion—these are not universal truths. Traditional African societies knew that community bonds, not productivity, hold people together. That people and their dignity, their well‑being, their collective potential are the foundation. Not profit. Not the hustle.

The ‘time is money’ mindset — that’s patriarchy speaking. It treats rest as indulgence, care as inefficiency, and slowness as failure. What if calmness, taking your time, moving at your own pace are actually strengths? What if that softer way — that more feminine rhythm — is a return to something we lost? I think about why I am so drawn to this remote working lifestyle. Maybe that’s what it looks like when people haven’t forgotten what time is actually for.

I know all the characters now. I know the stories. I’m just done trying to win a game I never believed in.

That’s freedom.