I worked early today. This morning, I heard my co-workers talk about their children's graduation, and it reminded me of MY memory of graduation. Me, when I graduated from a university at 22, I had literally no job to do. So until I got the current job, I had spent my days as a NEET (a person who has not been employed.) And, even worse, since that period I had been soaked in alcohol every day to escape from everything, especially living this life by my own responsibility.
When people do the graduation ceremonies, those events can mean putting an end period in their lives. Me, in a way after graduation from the university, my moratorium days still went on. Then, the REAL graduation from my moratorium could be... when? I sometimes feel like I am still in my youthful days in my 20s and 30s - the days I had been heavily, literally into a deep deep alcohol ocean.
But, I have to say sorry about this topic because there was no way for me to live another way, an alternative life. In a rural town at the end place of this planet - in a really small town, with no friends or no people who belong to the same generation, only alcohol was the one who talked to me so intimately (although I had been living with my parents.) Oh, I had to wait for the day I finally met my current friends who started working with me as members of the group of autism when I was 40.
Yes - since that day, through various activities with my friends - in a way, I started a certain process of graduating from my alcoholic, seriously hopeless moratorium (and getting into an invisible, unpredictable future.) Also, I could start throwing away my old, too-huge ambition of becoming a charisma/superhero because it was simply too heavy for me to carry with me. In a way, I finally started trying to give up my dream and living an actual adult life. Or, I might be able to use this word - an initiation.
I can't tell any "universal", or "absolute" truth. But, in a way I had to start learning how to give up... to become happier. So, even now I keep on quitting alcohol and starting a sober life by learning and reading like this (in Japanese, we say "晴耕雨読").
