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A bit of shocking news: yours truly had heart failure and was admitted to the hospital a few days ago. While I won't be doing street interviews anytime soon, here are some scenes from my hospital bed in HCU (high care unit), taken with my phone.

Spring has sprung 🌸春が来た! Rare picture of my family having a stroll around our neighborhood today (with a bonus closeup of my one-year-old toddler begging to go out).

It’s graduation month 👩‍🎓 🎓 Time to embrace adulthood.

“I’m from Ukraine and I do web design. I also do cosplay in my spare time. It’s never too late to start something new. I’m 27 and I started this hobby during quarantine last year. Growing up, I’ve always wanted to do cosplay but couldn’t afford it. So I just watched others instead. But then last year, during lockdown, I had so much time for thoughts. I watched Tik Tokers. So many cosplayers there. Maybe I should try it too. Age doesn’t matter. If you have an opportunity, why not? When I cosplay, I feel brave. It’s good for creativity, for imagination. Rather than buying ready-made costumes, I can create my own.

“I’ve been dealing with depression for a while now. I think coronavirus was the tipping point that finally made me decide to seek medical help. I’m a student from Singapore and our campus classes switched to online last year. That exacerbated this feeling of being alone in a foreign country with little English support. I didn’t know who to reach out to. Good thing I got the courage to share what I was going through with my friends. Turns out a lot of people have been going through the same thing. I had no idea. Shared experience brings comfort. That’s why now I’m very open to talk about mental health issues. I feel like a lot of people suffer in silence. I’ve been isolated in my apartment for a whole year, and I was doing poorly in some classes due to lack of motivation to login online. I owe it to my friends who helped me get through these tough times in Japan. For six years, I didn’t want to reach out for help. Even when I was in Singapore, I was thinking, ‘I’m fine. I can do it. I can handle it.’ But I was not. Now I’m getting the help that I need and on-campus classes are set to resume. So fingers crossed that 2021 will be the year that I finally feel better mentally, physically and emotionally. Hope to see my friends face-to-face again.”.

Her: “We met at a music festival. I was born in Osaka but moved to Sweden when I was 12. I’m half Japanese, half Swedish. He’s half Japanese, half Iranian.”.

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