Nobody Knew Me There

I spent about six months in Ireland. A lot happened there, and not all of it was easy. I struggled with my English, worried about what I was doing with my life, and had days when I felt completely lost. But when it came to people, there was something strangely comfortable about being there.

Nobody knew me.

Being Seen

Before I went abroad, I had been a PE teacher for five years. I taught at high schools, and for part of that time I also worked with middle school students. I think most teachers, especially those working outside big cities, will know what I mean when I say you get used to being seen. You go shopping and wonder if you will run into a student. You go out to eat and there might be a parent at the next table. Then Monday comes and someone says, “Sensei, I saw you at the supermarket on Saturday!” That happened quite often.

Nobody was doing anything wrong, and being recognized is probably better than being disliked or ignored. Where I grew up, it was also normal to meet someone and find a connection within minutes. “Oh, I know your parents.” “Oh, you’re the PE teacher at that high school?” Ask around a little, and it turns out everyone knows everyone. That has real benefits. People already have some idea of who you are, so you do not have to explain everything from the beginning, and it is easier to know how to treat each other. Everyone lives inside relationships like this, whether in a small town or a huge city. Maybe it is just a little more visible in a place like mine.

Still, I was never really comfortable with it. I started avoiding certain places on my days off. I thought about who might see me before deciding where to go, and about how something might look before thinking about whether I actually wanted to do it. I tried not to make waves, and even doing something a little stupid felt hard.

Nobody told me to do any of this. There was no rule, and most people probably cared far less than I imagined. I was doing it to myself. And when you live like that long enough, your world gets smaller without you noticing. Nothing dramatic happens. You just keep choosing the safer option.

Ireland

Then I went to Ireland, and almost overnight, all of that disappeared. Nobody there knew my family, where I had worked, what kind of teacher I had been, or what people back home thought of me. To most people, I was just some Asian guy named Daichi. Until I told them, a lot of people could not even be sure I was Japanese.

Being unknown was not always easier. I had to introduce myself again and again, and build every friendship and every bit of trust from scratch. Sometimes that was tiring. But mentally, it felt very light. I could walk around the city without wondering who I might run into. I could spend time with whoever I wanted without thinking about what somebody might say if they saw us together. I could go somewhere just because I wanted to go.

These sound like tiny things, and they probably are. But I noticed them. I also noticed that people were getting to know me without a version of me already in their heads. They had to talk to me, listen to what I thought, and decide for themselves what kind of person I was. I was still being seen, just without so much history attached.

Back home, I had been treating the small world around me as if it were the whole world. When you live in the same area, work in the same profession, and see the same people every day, their opinions start to feel enormous. In Ireland, almost none of those people were there, and life simply went on. Of course I already knew that in my head. But knowing something and actually feeling it are different, and Ireland made me feel it.

Posting Online

I noticed the same thing again with social media. When I started posting, one of the things I disliked most was the idea of people who knew me watching my videos. Former coworkers, friends, people from school, maybe even former students. Strangers did not bother me nearly as much, which is funny when I think about it. I was willing to put myself on the internet for anyone to see, but the thought of one person I knew finding it was embarrassing. I would imagine what they might say. “Why is he doing this?” “Does he really think he can pull this off?” Nobody had actually said any of those things. Again, I was creating the audience in my own head.

But as more people started watching from different countries, I began thinking less about the few people who already knew me and more about everyone who did not. There are billions of people in the world, and everyone I have ever met is an unbelievably small part of that. Their opinions still matter, and some of them matter a lot. They are just not the whole world.

At some point, I started feeling embarrassed that I had been so embarrassed.

I Still Care

I still care what people think of me. Of course I do, and I think that is probably a good thing. Our actions affect other people, and being aware of how we come across is part of living with them. I do not want to become someone who says “I don’t care what anyone thinks” and uses it as an excuse to do whatever he wants.

What changed is smaller than that. If I am not hurting anyone and there is something I genuinely want to do, I do not want an imaginary audience to be the reason I stop. I am sure I still let it stop me sometimes without noticing. But it decides a lot less for me than it used to.

I do not think everyone needs to move abroad for this. It does not even have to be another country. But I do think there is something valuable about spending time somewhere nobody already has an idea of who you are. At least for me, it showed me how much of my behavior had been shaped by the people and relationships around me.

Ireland did not turn me into a different person, and I did not stop caring what people thought. But it helped me come out of my shell a little. For a while, I got to live without most of the labels I had carried for years.

Nobody knew who I had been. So they had to get to know who I was.

And maybe I did too.