Last year, I took an impromptu solo trip to Japan. Suddenly, there I was: standing in the middle of Shinjuku Station, a massive beehive designed by someone who deeply hates tourists. People joke that you need to allocate a full day just to find the exit. I wasn’t laughing.
I was a total glitch in the simulation. Everyone was moving with this terrifying sense of purpose, and I was perfectly still, looking like I’d just been dropped out of a plane with nothing but an oversized backpack and a look of pure panic.
“Have I made a mistake?” I asked myself.
Actually, I wasn’t just asking, I was spiraling. I was being the guy I’ve carried around forever. You know him: the tourist who can’t find the right exit, the guy eating alone in a ramen shop staring intensely at his phone so nobody thinks he’s lonely, the guy who is mortified of making a mistake. When he’s in charge, even asking for a spoon feels like a high-stakes hostage negotiation.
I soon realized the friction wasn’t the Japanese language. It was my own ego. I was so busy trying to protect my “identity” as someone who knows what they’re doing that I couldn’t actually do anything.
But there is a specific kind of magic in being a solo traveler that nobody prepares you for.
Back home in Indonesia, I’m haunted by the versions of me I’ve already built. There are expectations from friends, family, and colleagues. I have a history there, a set of “chains” I’ve spent years forging. I’m constantly performing to match the person they already think I am.
But in Japan? I was a ghost. A blank slate.
Nobody in Shinjuku knew my name or my baggage. To them, I was just “Generic Tourist #411.” It was incredibly liberating to realize that all those social rules and self-imposed labels I carry around Jakarta just dropped off the moment Japanese immigration stamped my passport. When nobody knows who you are, it’s remarkably easy to become something new.
So, I decided to cheat. I stopped being “me” and started running a different script. I decided to act like the guy who actually belongs in Japan, a migrant worker on his first day, or a language student hunting for a part-time job.
Suddenly, everything changed. This new version of me had absolute, unearned confidence in his trash-tier Japanese. I’d walk into a tiny, smoky izakaya and butcher the language with the authority of a local. “Sumimasen,” I’d say, followed by a sentence that probably made zero grammatical sense and might have actually been an insult to the chef’s grandmother.
And the best part? I didn’t care.
Because I was playing a character, the stakes were gone. If I looked like an idiot, it wasn’t my failure. It was just a scene in a story that didn’t go perfectly. My real ego was safely tucked away behind the glass, untouched. I was finally free to actually try. I could explore, get lost, and fail miserably because I wasn’t busy protecting my pride.
But here’s the thing that hits you when you’re sitting in a garden near Shinjuku on a Sunday afternoon: once you realize you can fire your “current self” abroad, you start to wonder why you let him lead you around back home.
I look at my life back home now, and I see the same patterns. I used to think my personality was an immutable truth. I told myself I was “just shy” or “not the type” to lead a room. I’d write drafts for this blog but never hit publish because I was afraid of the “cringe.” Even when I’m playing video games, I catch myself playing “safely,” sticking to a determined path because I can’t handle the minor ego hit of losing my way.
But I realized that version of me isn’t a fact. It’s just a habit.
The sad part about the person you think you “really” are, the one you believed was final, is that he knows he could be different. He just chooses the familiar ache of standing still because it’s the only script he’s ever practiced. He’s the guy who thinks he’s a “reader” but never a “writer,” or a “player” but never a “leader.”
Identity isn’t some deep, unchangeable core. It’s an interface. It’s a series of choices about how you show up. Whether you’re the person who hides in the hotel room or the guy who confidently orders the wrong thing in broken Japanese, both are performances. Both are masks.
If you wake up and choose the anxious mask every single day, you’re still pretending. You’re just pretending to be someone who’s stuck.
And if you have to choose a mask anyway, you might as well choose the one you actually want to wear.
This post was originally written in 2023. It only took three years, a change of job, and a lot of overthinking to finally hit the ‘Publish’ button. Better late than never, I guess.
I realized there are also a lot of remaining drafts that remain unpublished. Got some editing work to do, so see you next time?