My brother's shadow

"Tsukasa! Wait for me!" I yelled out after my older brother. Growing up with the popular, 3 years my senior sibling that outshone me in everything. Grades. Girls. Sports. He obviously inherited my father's height. I did not.

"I felt like I was always trying to catch up to him, but never succeeded to."

He was the basketball star, I was the class jester.

I wanted to be just like him: popular, asked out on dates by pretty girls, teacher swooning over him. I was the angry one - always picking fights when people mocked that I was short for my age, unable to focus for longer than 10 minutes before my brain whirled uncontrollably down a thousand rabbit holes that never led to anywhere productive.

My father helped me control my attention deficit disorder and anxiety by teaching me to meditate every day for 15 minutes. It helped, but not enough. I got average grades, one best friend, and 0 dates up through the first year of high school.

It was after Tsukasa graduated that I started to discover my strengths. I learned how to break dance, a style not well-known in a rural city like Nikko in Japan thanks to my mother, Hana. She knew all the cool, old-school tricks of the trade from America. She found me YouTube instructional videos that helped me practice until I knew what I was doing.

I found out that I was really good with reading people - figuring out what they might want and pitch sales to them. That's when I focused on accelerating my education, taking college credit courses while in high school the last two years. My best friend, Ren, was creative artistically and business-saviness. He wanted to follow his acuity in finance, so I followed him along that path.

What I was really known for was fighting, though. A lot. I was bullied a lot, so I became meaner. Ruthless. Willing to end any fight that someone started. Even slapped a girl once. I wasn't proud of that.

I never told anyone that the violent urges started young. Green age of 7 years old, and I thought about things that I knew no other adolescent did. My father sensed something but never asked what. He taught me many skills, and I know it would have been worse without his help.