To the shock and awe of the crowd, this blog's name was inspired by the weekly anime publication: "Shounen Jump". It was originally meant to be titled "All the Things I Had It In For", plucked from a lyric from a song by a band called The National. After deciding that would be perhaps too pretentious of an introduction to you, dear reader, I pivoted to something that's hopefully endearing and only mildly appropriating and mostly unoriginal. Which feels like a more fitting representation of me. Though, so does the fact that my first rendition was something that feigned an air of being edgy and pretentious in the hopes of being likable and cool.
I'm writing this first entry while I re-watch my favorite episode of Netflix's Midnight Diner for the umpteenth time, the one that I have memorized and translated, the one that makes me feel like maybe I have a snowball's chance in hell at being proficient in Japanese someday. I'm currently wearing a HunterXHunter shirt, I have a Steins;Gate case on my iPhone, I do (did, screams the peanut gallery) jiu jitsu, I have a bookshelf full of anime figurines (only half of whom are scantily clad women), and my favorite food on the planet is ramen. I am, in fact, a walking stereotype. The weab personified and embodied.
How did I arrive here? By spending most of my life trying to be somebody I wasn't. Somebody I could never be. Maybe the over indexing on all things Japanese culture is nothing more than a whiplash response to silencing my inner nerd for nigh on my full 28, going on 29, years. Maybe, though, it's who I was always meant to be.
As a child, we moved almost every 2 years. Sometimes less, sometimes more, but on average I was starting over roughly that often. With every move, I was hoping desperately that this, this would be the move where it finally clicked. I'd be friends with the cool kids, I'd finally become athletic and fit, I'd care about all the sports and be "one of the boys", my newest crush would return all of my affections, and I'd generally be... happy.
I never seemed to arrive at happy.
I did, however, push myself further and further away from who I was at my core in the name of moving closer to a version of myself that I might finally find palatable. The paradox of the whole thing, though, was that my definition of palatable was driven entirely by other people. And the thing about people is that people are different. Every single one of them, in fact.
So what did I do? I tried desperately to put on a different mask in front of each person that I met. Each group of friends I tried to weasel my way into. Each job that I had. Each hobby that I picked up. All in the name of trying to fit the definition of "Jordan" that the person standing in front of me wanted to see. I accumulated countless versions of myself. None of whom were quite right. It was like looking around a fun house full of mirrors, constantly seeing slightly distorted representations of something that almost looked like me.
Not once did I consider becoming the version of Jordan who could stand in front of a crystal clear mirror, recognize himself, and feel damn proud of it.
This, unsurprisingly, created a bit of a cognitive dissonance. I didn't know up from down, whether I was gay or straight or somewhere in between, what hobbies were cool, which sports teams to like, what job I should want, what to wear, what I should spend my money on, or where I wanted to live. It all depended on what I thought the person in front of me wanted to see. Eventually it just became what I thought the world at large wanted to see. I was trying to become something that pass all scrutiny, but wasn't quite human anymore.
Maybe I was being disingenuous, but it always felt real in the moment. Because the fear of being who I was and being disliked was so much deeper than the desire to be authentically me that I didn't even consider a different possibility.
That all started to change in 2017.
I had a viral heart infection that nearly killed me, and I started to ask different questions.
I made a lot of changes in the couple of years after that (more on that some other time), which ultimately lead me to taking my first trip to Japan in 2019.
And then everything changed again.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I knew where I wanted to go. Who I wanted to be. What I wanted my life to look like. I had never really watched an anime before that trip (other than the DBZ and Mobile Suit Gundam dubs on toonnami as a kid), I had never read a manga, and I had only had approximations of a bowl of ramen. When I got back from the trip, however, I remembered that I still had all of my pokemon cards stored at my parent's house.
I dug them out, and what did I find? An entire set written in hiragana and katakana.
So, it turns out, maybe the kid version of me always knew exactly who he was and who he wanted to become. What he wanted his life to look like. So, now, I make choices that are in service of honoring him.
Which, really, is about honoring myself.
For the astute reader, yes, this has simply been a really long winded justification for why I'm a giant fucking nerd.
Welcome to the party.
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