Part 1 of 2
Around this time 10 years ago, I left for Fukuoka, Japan with my family. It would only be for about a year, but it would change the direction of my life, and not in the way that I had expected it would. I had won a Fulbright award, and I was pursuing academic research at Kyushu University, doing a project that I designed myself. It involved studying Japanese culture using film ~movies~ and I love using film as a medium to look at collective consciousness. It was an amazing time. I loved our life in Japan, and it was just absolutely crazy that someone like me was able to get a grant like this and live abroad doing something that I just sort of pulled out of my brain. You see, I wasn’t a typical student, a mother and wife in my 30’s having just graduated with my BA, and I didn’t come from a family where going to college was the norm. So accomplishing something like this was beyond anything I had ever imagined for my life.
I loved living there and I loved researching film. I thought it was the beginning of a career in academia, but when I was in Japan, something shifted. I had some family stuff happen back home that really shook me, and when the subject of applying to grad school in Japan was brought up, I knew that I couldn’t stay; I had to go home and help out. I also knew that I wanted to expand the scope of my studies beyond the limitations of Japan and East Asia, but I wasn’t sure which discipline fit my interests. I had fallen head over heels in love with film from India. It was weird, unexpected, and different from every other style of film I had ever been interested in, and I found myself replaying films from India while reading cross cultural studies on Japanese and Indian family systems. So, I figured I would go home, help out with family stuff, and apply to graduate programs. Then, I would get into grad school, apply for more grants, and I would visit India and be back in Japan for an even longer stay when the dust settled and my son was a little older, but things didn’t go the way that I thought they would.
So we left Japan, and resettling in the US was a full nightmare. It was nearly impossible to find an affordable place in Boston after having been away for a year. The cost of living had gone up tremendously since we had surrendered our cheap apartment in Jamaica Plain the year before, so I couldn’t just focus on graduate applications. We had to find jobs. I took a 9-5 at an ESL campus for Japanese students studying abroad in the US. I submitted what I had and didn’t get into any of the graduate programs that I applied to. I made friends at work though, and I was pretty good at my job, even if I knew that it wasn’t what I really wanted to be doing. Before I knew it, three years had passed while my graduate applications sat dormant after the first (and only) round of rejections.
Working in higher education revealed a lot about the nature of Academia; my colleagues were often over-educated, unrecognized, and underpaid faculty who were barely scraping by. It became clear that pursuing graduate studies followed by a career in academia was a gamble that would require many destabilizing moves for my family (who were still feeling the shift from a move across the world just a few years prior). I ended up leaving my job when my son was having trouble adjusting at school. I couldn’t balance work and family. And that was when I found myself taking a class on Āyurveda. I didn’t even really know what it was. I had seen the word in Indian cookbooks, a hobby that I had picked up while watching all of those movies. I mostly thought it was going to mostly be a cooking class with some health advice attached. Boy was I wrong about that…
It took me a while to understand the deeper meaning in all of this. In fact, it took astrology for me to see how this was all part of a larger unfolding. A plan that I didn’t yet have the blueprint for. I didn’t understand how my relationship with academia seemed to just vanish after so much success. I felt lost in the world, as if it had ghosted me, and I didn’t know how to tie together the things that I wanted to do with my life. And then there I was, in a classroom, studying Āyurveda, and it hit me: I had to do this. Not just this. But it was the start of a great many things that I had to do, and all of these things would come together in time, as they were meant to, and I didn’t have to worry about it.
To find out where this all went, and what astrology helped me to understand about this particular life phase and about myself, stay tuned for part 2.
