Lost in Thought. Lost in Me. Lost in You. Lost in Japan.
As you know, I’ve been wheelchair traveling around Japan. It’s been 3 weeks today, and we have 12 more days here before we head to Taiwan and Korea. So far, we’ve completed Tokyo, Matsumoto, Takayama, Japan Alps, and Nagoya. We’re working on crossing off our last 2 cities before we leave Japan.
I’ve been sharing daily travel memoirs and musings from my perspective as we travel through Asia. I typically do this while traveling. These daily shares are meant to bring my followers with me so they can experience some of what I see through my perspective—as a disabled traveler, as an artist and writer, as a Korean-Japanese American adoptee who has been caught between two cultural worlds since she was 4, and as a human in her mid-forties who has been on a search for herself since she was young.
I keep a travel diary, and some of these excerpts make it into the public eye. I’m very much an in-the-moment kind of person, so this is how I write. Many times I share beginning thoughts in my Instagram stories, and then when I have time, I clean up the writing and make it into a post. Here is one I recently shared:
May 27, 2024 @ 3:45AM / Takayama, Japan
I’m awake and in insurmountable pain. Fatigue has cloaked me from sky to floor. My chronic stomach is no friend of mine. I could never explain the pain I’ve been in behind the smiles. The smile is genuine as I’m able to ignore pain when I’m truly inspired to live while traveling or creating, but eventually my body catches up and reminds me who is boss. My will is constantly pushing against my body, and I’m just an innocent bystander watching it happen.
We’ve actually got quite a bit of rest since we left Tokyo. The great thing about nature and smaller towns is everything shuts down by 5 p.m., forcing us to rest, which we have delightfully complied with. But in this pause, my body is able to scream much louder at me.
I don’t share these things for sympathy, but rather because a lot of disabled people go through this - pushing themselves to do basic things that every other non-disabled person does without thought and yet is such an effort for us, especially when inaccessibility lords over us. But we do it because we just want to live.
People tell me to slow down, and some think I should stay in my house where it’s safe and unchallenging, but they don’t live with a rare progressive disease that is taking everything from them and will not stop-allowing limited time. They don’t live with sand draining from the hours of their glass, and they don’t live with the kind of dripping passion I’ve had pre disability - heightening and lit on fire post-disability. They don’t live with the nonstop audible thoughts, ideas and constant creative visions of what is possible. And they don’t live with a soul that just wants to create and connect, but was given a body that can’t truly paint the world the way she envisions.
I live this way mostly because I’m scared that if I don’t keep going, I’ll arrive at a place of completely giving up—because I’ve been there before—in complete despair with no reason to keep living. I know this darkness too well, so I give myself reasons to live, sampling life more than most because of this will that carries me through.
This entire journey has been profound, complex, cavernous, beautiful, and yet terribly painful—the kind that blisters, insightful, heart-wrenching, and inspiring; a teacher to my being. It has been love and compassion in full action, gouging a permanent wound that will never leave me. I answer to this gash in full humility through living, loving, and creating the world I see most passionately.
#kamswheelstravel #kamwrites #kamdraws @ https://www.instagram.com/kamredlawsk