I arrived at Ohayocon 2018 as Akiba Idol Emily.
I was there to kick ass and take names, and I was ready. I was in full idol costume wherever I went, and I had business cards to give out to con goers. I did everything from both raves to all sorts of different panels, stopping short of a guerrilla live solely because I wasn't sure how an industry-based con would deal. I had just come out with my second single as AIE, and I was enjoying life and where my Japanese idol career would take me.
And she was by my side the entire time, and together, we were invincible. I felt like I could do anything with my best friend, my biggest fan, by my side. Someday, she would be an idol with me, and together we would conquer the world. And then it all came crashing down around me. The person who said that she loved me so much never actually loved me at all, hidden behind faulty mental fabric and uncorrected chemistry and the blatant refusal to seek help.
So I did what I do best: I destroyed myself. In this case, I destroyed Akiba Idol Emily, the dream that we both held dear. It was aided, of course. The singing competition at Matsuricon, the next event coming up, would not let me join solely because of my staff status. And the other idols in Ohio no longer acknowledged I existed. In reality, I don't blame them. They knew the truth long before I did: I needed to stop pretending and stop being a fake idol.
I arrived at Matsuricon 2018 with an uncertain future, judgement upon my own head, and enough stress and self-blame to disable a lesser person. I knew Mikkun would make it possible to have fun, somehow. But I wasn't getting my hopes up. That was all I had done before, after all, and look where that got me -- alone and with a wrecked dream, shattered in pieces on the sandy beach, half knowing where to go next but not ready to trust the process.
--
Matsuricon is smaller than Ohayocon, this I knew. It was my first time at the full con itself; I had been on Sunday once before. It was also my first time staffing an anime convention. My temp days in NYC saw me staff fashion shows like Coterie -- it's where I met Garo. So I treated this the same: with specific shifts, little focus on the actual show, uniforms, and direct attention on the customer at all times. I fully expected to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch in 10 minute break periods.
I told Mikkun about all of this and he laughed it off. It won't be like that at all, he said. Give it time. It will be fine.
But I still stressed. I stressed about getting enough food. I stressed about making sure I had cash for the dealer's room -- you know, if I even got a chance to go. I stressed about putting Kuro in the parking garage. When the Goodale side doors were locked, I trudged my bag all the way down High to the Hyatt entrance, marking this as probably the first stroke of my bad luck to befall me this convention. I checked in, got my badge, and went upstairs. Mikkun eventually joined me, something else I blamed myself for. I should have known better and planned ahead to grab him after work instead of heading straight to the Hyatt myself.
We slept and woke up early to meet up with our department. After learning the ropes, I was told I was relieved for a bit to go do what I wanted. I headed back up to the room to change into my casual cosplay, prepared to fight with my hair to get it just right or else. Housekeeping had already cleaned up our room after Mikkun and I had been in it, and I glared at the clean mirror in front of me, spreading my hair supplies across the sink counter.
When I reached for a towel, I hit my head on the bar. It seems so trivial when I write it now, but it was the last straw.
If the Secret Service had been on the ninth floor of the Hyatt, they most certainly would have forced their way into my room and arrested me. But six floors down, nobody can hear you scream. Nobody knows what happens all the way up in the sky. I know from NYC that nobody cares. It's just another building. In the blur of what happened next, I lost my mind and sobbed out loud, not caring who could hear me or why. I was here at a convention and I should be having fun and I wasn't. None of this was fun. Everything was falling apart around me.
It wasn't fair that she wasn't here.
It wasn't fair that I was being ignored by the very people I wanted to like me.
It wasn't fair.
It wasn't fair.
--
Even then, I understood that I had to cry it out. I couldn't just go downstairs a mess. So I stayed away longer than I should have, and when I was ready, I put my cosplay together the best I could.
When I arrived back at our station, Mikkun pulled me aside, and I cried into his shoulder some more, and then I threw myself into my work. It's the only way I know sometimes how to function. It got me to stop thinking, at least for a little while, and I worked the rest of the day in relative peace. When I was relieved again, I headed to the vendors room, smaller and in a different location than Ohayocon. I didn't wander for too long, but still found some things I had been looking for for a long time.
Then I was relieved one last time at the end of the night to go sing karaoke. Originally it was going to be a place I could sing outside of the idol contest I wasn't allowed to join. But as I shut down the AIE project, I found I had some serious trouble picking out what to sing. No longer forcing myself to sing what I had composed for fame and fortune, I had no clue what I was doing. As I struggled at home, weeks before the convention, I finally met friends who were each in a similar position to me. We all decided that, someday, we'd sing together, and recorded a short version of AIE's Rainbow Colored Reality to help seal our promise.
They helped me pick out a song or two to sing at Matsuricon's karaoke, but when they announced they would only accept songs that were four minutes or less and that they would cut us off if we went longer, I found myself at a loss. The vast majority of anime songs are between 4 and 6 minutes long. What could I even sing? And I flipped through my phone and found the only backing track that was exactly three minutes and fifty eight seconds.
When called up, I plugged my phone in and it took exactly five tries to get it right. I'm sure the organizers thought I was crazy. I was already embarrassed. But then I finally got the first notes to play right, and so I sang, and for good measure and to keep me going I did the dance I had choreographed months ago. I had never performed as Akiba Idol Emily before, but here I was, my first and last live, not even as an idol anymore.
I fought to force the words out. None of it felt right. My voice started to crack. But then I thought of my new friends, how we all wanted to sing together -- not to the tune of what corporate America wanted us to sing. And certainly not in four minutes or less. So when I sang the end, I knew they were singing with me, and I let their voices ring out in my own mind.
This life is distorted, and I can't find the new path --
but EVEN SO!
If I can just have one wish, let reality become a rainbow...
We went upstairs and showered and Mikkun went to sleep, but we were immediately woken up by our roommates, finally arriving after a long trip into Columbus. The noise kept me awake, and soon everybody was asleep but me. Rainbow Colored Reality was lodged in my head, and I couldn't get it out.
Around four in the morning, desperate for sleep, I swore I started hallucinating. The center clock from Grand Central Terminal was outside my window, in the convention center courtyard, a reminder of the Union Station that once stood here. It started glowing so bright that I was lost in the spinning hands, and the entire world began to tilt. The self hate ran rampant in my head. I hated myself for letting the AIE project die, but I also hated that I couldn't just kill it off. Why had I sang that anyway? Did I deserve to sing? I had done nothing but mess it up. I wasn't worthy of standing on a stage with a microphone. But then the words turned again in my head, and I found myself surrounded by whispers. The song taunted me even after I threw my headphones on and put white noise in my ears. Synesthesia is a blessing, but oftentimes it is quite the curse.
I finally banished the song from my brain, but Mikkun had begun to snore, something I knew I couldn't kill. I tried to wake him up three times to tell him of my peril. All three times he started to wake up to help, but fell back asleep before he could. Frustrated, I began to cry, then hit him with my pillow and gathered my belongings. I tried to put my yukata on solo, but failed and settled for the staff shirt and jeans.
For a while I sat downstairs on the convention center's second floor. The entire place was dead quiet save for some security. In a few short hours, Matsuricon would be happening all around me with happy fans and guests of honor and everybody oblivious of the waking nightmare I was stuck in. I messaged Mikkun and said I wasn't actually mad at him, then when seven o'clock hit, I walked to the convention center's Starbucks and ordered a chai. I sat in the Hyatt lobby on a couch, sipped quietly, and let the morning be.
Somewhere between the beginning and the last sip, I accepted my situation. I was going to be staffing a convention Saturday with somewhere at about a half hour of sleep. Despite the previous day's shortcomings, I had to give what I could to the team and also take care of myself. I had to take it at my pace. And that was something I knew I could do. No more singing. No more work pressures. I had let those all go the previous day, left all over the place on the bathroom floor, left to be cleaned up by housekeeping and taken out with the trash. What remained afterward was a more barren but a simpler me, and that was the me I had to carry into my work, for better or worse.
--
Turned out that despite his snoring, Mikkun hadn't slept that well either, waking up every fifteen minutes or so due to something or another. We arrived at our station both exhausted but ready, and fit a couple of hours in before the directors told us to go back upstairs and get a nap. This was, of course, right when my work friend arrived to collect my phone; I had an EX-Raid in Pokemon Go scheduled for that day and since I was working the convention, my friend would take my phone and play in my stead. This unfortunately meant I was awake during my naptime.
Before we arrived back at my room, Mikkun stopped by the convention convenience store, looking for a bottle of NyQuil to knock me out. He bought the only one left at a crazy twenty dollars for the whole bottle when we didn't have another option. I drank half a dose before my friend arrived, and then another half in an attempt to even feel drowsy. It didn't work.
It simply gave me more time to think to myself. The same music was stuck in my head again, and I wasn't sure I'd ever sleep in this bed again. What would that mean for the rest of the convention? I kept myself busy by thinking about what I would do instead of be Akiba Idol Emily at a convention...and somewhere in the mess, I remembered my true dream. The one I had rediscovered thanks to counseling and therapy, the dream I've longed for year after year after year, the one I want to finally sacrifice my years working towards. I wrapped my ideas around me like a blanket and took solace in them, not able to sleep but still at peace. I may not ever be an idol, but I could sing with my friends, and I knew where I belonged with my music even better now.
I did manage to successfully wake Mikkun up fifteen minutes before our scheduled nap was done, simply so he could hold me. I started to cry again, but this time for a completely different reason.
--
We made our way back downstairs in yukata and worked through our shifts, hanging out together and keeping ourselves awake. I grabbed the most glorious half hour nap possible on a table in the ops room, with lots of cosplayed wrestlers around me. I met lots of Mikkun's friends as they all came to visit, people he had known for years. I went to play at the arcade until my geta threw off my nerves, and Mikkun practically carried me back upstairs to go back into jeans and a t-shirt.
This time, I forsook karaoke -- and its rules -- for the dance party, led by Teddyloid, a name rather well known in the J-Pop and anime community. Mikkun is not a raver by any stretch of the means, but when I arrived I ran into a bunch of my other gamer friends. We stood and waited together and I danced a bit. In my AIE stress, I had left all of my raver candy and glow items at home, not even sure I wanted to dance at all. The pre-show threw out glowsticks, and I grabbed a couple and danced anyway, conserving what strength I could for the actual show.
When Teddyloid came out onto stage, everybody cheered so loud it reminded me of the loudest crowd I had ever heard -- not quite the wall of sound, but close enough to remind me. And as he began to sing and perform, I realized he was performing just as he was on stage, and the entire crowd was completely locked in with what he was doing. I knew how I could do the same someday, and while I know I will never make EDM music like that, I will continue to make music for those who will listen. I will make things for fun, and I will bring about my artistry in a way I see fit.
I danced as long as my feet would take me, and toward the end of the set he played the song that was the soundtrack to my Ohayocon 2011. And I turned to my friends and we shouted the words as loud as we could. Fly away, fly away now, fly away! It didn't matter that she was no longer with me, or that they were long gone as well. This music was something I could wrap around me, and I felt my groove finally return after truly being lost for so long.
--
I finally slept that night, after we rescued one of Mikkun's friends from a drunken night of doom. Turned out he had puked near a panel room, and we sobered him up before getting him an Uber. It was three in the morning before I slept, but thank God I did.
In the morning we packed up, finished our Sunday shifts, and I got to play Bemani with a new friend. Matsuricon was over, just like that. By all accounts, you would say it was a horrible time -- I had a mental breakdown, I didn't sleep, I spent more time crying than being happy, and there always seemed like there was something. But I told Mikkun later that it had to happen that way. The stress of losing her -- the stress of losing AIE -- the horror of me losing my way meant that I had to shed all of that, and I did so at Matsuricon 2018 of all places. I emerged from the convention hallway with none of the stress I had coming in. The struggles are not over, but from this point on I can never, ever give up, and continue to do well.
We went to the staff dinner and, on our way back, Mikkun stopped in the Hyatt to use the bathroom. I stuck my head into the convenience store and walked to the back where the makeshift pharmacy was. Sure enough, there were no more bottles of NyQuil. Everything that happened this past weekend was only made possible because Mikkun was able to catch me when I fell. I may not even really swing that way, but this weekend made me flip over the swingset several times for him. I never thought that my love could deepen so far for somebody, but it has for him, and that is something I will hold dear for all of eternity. He made my convention -- every second of it.
The fun I will have next is for all of you, of course. But it ultimately is for me and me alone.
I was there to kick ass and take names, and I was ready. I was in full idol costume wherever I went, and I had business cards to give out to con goers. I did everything from both raves to all sorts of different panels, stopping short of a guerrilla live solely because I wasn't sure how an industry-based con would deal. I had just come out with my second single as AIE, and I was enjoying life and where my Japanese idol career would take me.
And she was by my side the entire time, and together, we were invincible. I felt like I could do anything with my best friend, my biggest fan, by my side. Someday, she would be an idol with me, and together we would conquer the world. And then it all came crashing down around me. The person who said that she loved me so much never actually loved me at all, hidden behind faulty mental fabric and uncorrected chemistry and the blatant refusal to seek help.
So I did what I do best: I destroyed myself. In this case, I destroyed Akiba Idol Emily, the dream that we both held dear. It was aided, of course. The singing competition at Matsuricon, the next event coming up, would not let me join solely because of my staff status. And the other idols in Ohio no longer acknowledged I existed. In reality, I don't blame them. They knew the truth long before I did: I needed to stop pretending and stop being a fake idol.
I arrived at Matsuricon 2018 with an uncertain future, judgement upon my own head, and enough stress and self-blame to disable a lesser person. I knew Mikkun would make it possible to have fun, somehow. But I wasn't getting my hopes up. That was all I had done before, after all, and look where that got me -- alone and with a wrecked dream, shattered in pieces on the sandy beach, half knowing where to go next but not ready to trust the process.
--
Matsuricon is smaller than Ohayocon, this I knew. It was my first time at the full con itself; I had been on Sunday once before. It was also my first time staffing an anime convention. My temp days in NYC saw me staff fashion shows like Coterie -- it's where I met Garo. So I treated this the same: with specific shifts, little focus on the actual show, uniforms, and direct attention on the customer at all times. I fully expected to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch in 10 minute break periods.
I told Mikkun about all of this and he laughed it off. It won't be like that at all, he said. Give it time. It will be fine.
But I still stressed. I stressed about getting enough food. I stressed about making sure I had cash for the dealer's room -- you know, if I even got a chance to go. I stressed about putting Kuro in the parking garage. When the Goodale side doors were locked, I trudged my bag all the way down High to the Hyatt entrance, marking this as probably the first stroke of my bad luck to befall me this convention. I checked in, got my badge, and went upstairs. Mikkun eventually joined me, something else I blamed myself for. I should have known better and planned ahead to grab him after work instead of heading straight to the Hyatt myself.
We slept and woke up early to meet up with our department. After learning the ropes, I was told I was relieved for a bit to go do what I wanted. I headed back up to the room to change into my casual cosplay, prepared to fight with my hair to get it just right or else. Housekeeping had already cleaned up our room after Mikkun and I had been in it, and I glared at the clean mirror in front of me, spreading my hair supplies across the sink counter.
When I reached for a towel, I hit my head on the bar. It seems so trivial when I write it now, but it was the last straw.
If the Secret Service had been on the ninth floor of the Hyatt, they most certainly would have forced their way into my room and arrested me. But six floors down, nobody can hear you scream. Nobody knows what happens all the way up in the sky. I know from NYC that nobody cares. It's just another building. In the blur of what happened next, I lost my mind and sobbed out loud, not caring who could hear me or why. I was here at a convention and I should be having fun and I wasn't. None of this was fun. Everything was falling apart around me.
It wasn't fair that she wasn't here.
It wasn't fair that I was being ignored by the very people I wanted to like me.
It wasn't fair.
It wasn't fair.
--
Even then, I understood that I had to cry it out. I couldn't just go downstairs a mess. So I stayed away longer than I should have, and when I was ready, I put my cosplay together the best I could.
When I arrived back at our station, Mikkun pulled me aside, and I cried into his shoulder some more, and then I threw myself into my work. It's the only way I know sometimes how to function. It got me to stop thinking, at least for a little while, and I worked the rest of the day in relative peace. When I was relieved again, I headed to the vendors room, smaller and in a different location than Ohayocon. I didn't wander for too long, but still found some things I had been looking for for a long time.
Then I was relieved one last time at the end of the night to go sing karaoke. Originally it was going to be a place I could sing outside of the idol contest I wasn't allowed to join. But as I shut down the AIE project, I found I had some serious trouble picking out what to sing. No longer forcing myself to sing what I had composed for fame and fortune, I had no clue what I was doing. As I struggled at home, weeks before the convention, I finally met friends who were each in a similar position to me. We all decided that, someday, we'd sing together, and recorded a short version of AIE's Rainbow Colored Reality to help seal our promise.
They helped me pick out a song or two to sing at Matsuricon's karaoke, but when they announced they would only accept songs that were four minutes or less and that they would cut us off if we went longer, I found myself at a loss. The vast majority of anime songs are between 4 and 6 minutes long. What could I even sing? And I flipped through my phone and found the only backing track that was exactly three minutes and fifty eight seconds.
When called up, I plugged my phone in and it took exactly five tries to get it right. I'm sure the organizers thought I was crazy. I was already embarrassed. But then I finally got the first notes to play right, and so I sang, and for good measure and to keep me going I did the dance I had choreographed months ago. I had never performed as Akiba Idol Emily before, but here I was, my first and last live, not even as an idol anymore.
I fought to force the words out. None of it felt right. My voice started to crack. But then I thought of my new friends, how we all wanted to sing together -- not to the tune of what corporate America wanted us to sing. And certainly not in four minutes or less. So when I sang the end, I knew they were singing with me, and I let their voices ring out in my own mind.
This life is distorted, and I can't find the new path --
but EVEN SO!
If I can just have one wish, let reality become a rainbow...
We went upstairs and showered and Mikkun went to sleep, but we were immediately woken up by our roommates, finally arriving after a long trip into Columbus. The noise kept me awake, and soon everybody was asleep but me. Rainbow Colored Reality was lodged in my head, and I couldn't get it out.
Around four in the morning, desperate for sleep, I swore I started hallucinating. The center clock from Grand Central Terminal was outside my window, in the convention center courtyard, a reminder of the Union Station that once stood here. It started glowing so bright that I was lost in the spinning hands, and the entire world began to tilt. The self hate ran rampant in my head. I hated myself for letting the AIE project die, but I also hated that I couldn't just kill it off. Why had I sang that anyway? Did I deserve to sing? I had done nothing but mess it up. I wasn't worthy of standing on a stage with a microphone. But then the words turned again in my head, and I found myself surrounded by whispers. The song taunted me even after I threw my headphones on and put white noise in my ears. Synesthesia is a blessing, but oftentimes it is quite the curse.
I finally banished the song from my brain, but Mikkun had begun to snore, something I knew I couldn't kill. I tried to wake him up three times to tell him of my peril. All three times he started to wake up to help, but fell back asleep before he could. Frustrated, I began to cry, then hit him with my pillow and gathered my belongings. I tried to put my yukata on solo, but failed and settled for the staff shirt and jeans.
For a while I sat downstairs on the convention center's second floor. The entire place was dead quiet save for some security. In a few short hours, Matsuricon would be happening all around me with happy fans and guests of honor and everybody oblivious of the waking nightmare I was stuck in. I messaged Mikkun and said I wasn't actually mad at him, then when seven o'clock hit, I walked to the convention center's Starbucks and ordered a chai. I sat in the Hyatt lobby on a couch, sipped quietly, and let the morning be.
Somewhere between the beginning and the last sip, I accepted my situation. I was going to be staffing a convention Saturday with somewhere at about a half hour of sleep. Despite the previous day's shortcomings, I had to give what I could to the team and also take care of myself. I had to take it at my pace. And that was something I knew I could do. No more singing. No more work pressures. I had let those all go the previous day, left all over the place on the bathroom floor, left to be cleaned up by housekeeping and taken out with the trash. What remained afterward was a more barren but a simpler me, and that was the me I had to carry into my work, for better or worse.
--
Turned out that despite his snoring, Mikkun hadn't slept that well either, waking up every fifteen minutes or so due to something or another. We arrived at our station both exhausted but ready, and fit a couple of hours in before the directors told us to go back upstairs and get a nap. This was, of course, right when my work friend arrived to collect my phone; I had an EX-Raid in Pokemon Go scheduled for that day and since I was working the convention, my friend would take my phone and play in my stead. This unfortunately meant I was awake during my naptime.
Before we arrived back at my room, Mikkun stopped by the convention convenience store, looking for a bottle of NyQuil to knock me out. He bought the only one left at a crazy twenty dollars for the whole bottle when we didn't have another option. I drank half a dose before my friend arrived, and then another half in an attempt to even feel drowsy. It didn't work.
It simply gave me more time to think to myself. The same music was stuck in my head again, and I wasn't sure I'd ever sleep in this bed again. What would that mean for the rest of the convention? I kept myself busy by thinking about what I would do instead of be Akiba Idol Emily at a convention...and somewhere in the mess, I remembered my true dream. The one I had rediscovered thanks to counseling and therapy, the dream I've longed for year after year after year, the one I want to finally sacrifice my years working towards. I wrapped my ideas around me like a blanket and took solace in them, not able to sleep but still at peace. I may not ever be an idol, but I could sing with my friends, and I knew where I belonged with my music even better now.
I did manage to successfully wake Mikkun up fifteen minutes before our scheduled nap was done, simply so he could hold me. I started to cry again, but this time for a completely different reason.
--
We made our way back downstairs in yukata and worked through our shifts, hanging out together and keeping ourselves awake. I grabbed the most glorious half hour nap possible on a table in the ops room, with lots of cosplayed wrestlers around me. I met lots of Mikkun's friends as they all came to visit, people he had known for years. I went to play at the arcade until my geta threw off my nerves, and Mikkun practically carried me back upstairs to go back into jeans and a t-shirt.
This time, I forsook karaoke -- and its rules -- for the dance party, led by Teddyloid, a name rather well known in the J-Pop and anime community. Mikkun is not a raver by any stretch of the means, but when I arrived I ran into a bunch of my other gamer friends. We stood and waited together and I danced a bit. In my AIE stress, I had left all of my raver candy and glow items at home, not even sure I wanted to dance at all. The pre-show threw out glowsticks, and I grabbed a couple and danced anyway, conserving what strength I could for the actual show.
When Teddyloid came out onto stage, everybody cheered so loud it reminded me of the loudest crowd I had ever heard -- not quite the wall of sound, but close enough to remind me. And as he began to sing and perform, I realized he was performing just as he was on stage, and the entire crowd was completely locked in with what he was doing. I knew how I could do the same someday, and while I know I will never make EDM music like that, I will continue to make music for those who will listen. I will make things for fun, and I will bring about my artistry in a way I see fit.
I danced as long as my feet would take me, and toward the end of the set he played the song that was the soundtrack to my Ohayocon 2011. And I turned to my friends and we shouted the words as loud as we could. Fly away, fly away now, fly away! It didn't matter that she was no longer with me, or that they were long gone as well. This music was something I could wrap around me, and I felt my groove finally return after truly being lost for so long.
--
I finally slept that night, after we rescued one of Mikkun's friends from a drunken night of doom. Turned out he had puked near a panel room, and we sobered him up before getting him an Uber. It was three in the morning before I slept, but thank God I did.
In the morning we packed up, finished our Sunday shifts, and I got to play Bemani with a new friend. Matsuricon was over, just like that. By all accounts, you would say it was a horrible time -- I had a mental breakdown, I didn't sleep, I spent more time crying than being happy, and there always seemed like there was something. But I told Mikkun later that it had to happen that way. The stress of losing her -- the stress of losing AIE -- the horror of me losing my way meant that I had to shed all of that, and I did so at Matsuricon 2018 of all places. I emerged from the convention hallway with none of the stress I had coming in. The struggles are not over, but from this point on I can never, ever give up, and continue to do well.
We went to the staff dinner and, on our way back, Mikkun stopped in the Hyatt to use the bathroom. I stuck my head into the convenience store and walked to the back where the makeshift pharmacy was. Sure enough, there were no more bottles of NyQuil. Everything that happened this past weekend was only made possible because Mikkun was able to catch me when I fell. I may not even really swing that way, but this weekend made me flip over the swingset several times for him. I never thought that my love could deepen so far for somebody, but it has for him, and that is something I will hold dear for all of eternity. He made my convention -- every second of it.
The fun I will have next is for all of you, of course. But it ultimately is for me and me alone.