A Change of Plans

They say once is an accident, twice is a fluke, and three times is a pattern. But sometimes you can't wait around for a third confirmation.

Deja vu. I'm sitting in a Texas coffee shop, 6,600 miles away from my husband. My better half. My home. Once again, because he loves me better than I love myself.

According to Sergey, it only took a month back in Tokyo before I started deteriorating again. I could never get enough sleep and what sleep I got wasn't restful. When I woke, I had no energy for my day and rapidly retreated to the bedroom, the room where I experienced the least stress.

We were planning on returning to the States for the holidays so I was once again trying to hold out as hard as I could. With a week and a half to go and me barely able to drag through half a day, Sergey sent me to a hotel. We've had a running theory that living a block away from an ambulance deployment center has been a central problem in both of our sleep, and he tested it by putting himself in the innermost room of the apartment and sending me to a hotel. Immediately, both of us started sleeping better.

So, we thought the answer was simple. Our house in Texas is super quiet, and when we returned I would get the necessary rest to recover in the month and a half that we would be there. Then we'd return to Tokyo in mid-January and start looking around small towns for a quiet place to live.

I did not sleep on the flight home. I barely slept the next day. I started feeling like a cornered animal as I scrounged three or six hours of sleep every 24 hours. The light became intolerable again. I sought rooms in the house with the most blackout curtains. I slept alone in the guest room because I needed to control the environment perfectly–darkness, lit candle, gentle music.

Swathed in a huge sleep hoodie and fuzzy pajama pants for most of the day, I would lay in bed under layers of quilts and a heating pad, gaming on the Switch. I needed people, but even conversations I relished left my system screaming afterward from the effort. The first week and a half was spent fighting to get from fragment of sleep to fragment of sleep. I was constantly wracked by guilt, insecurity, despair and anxiety.

None of these states were my usual food-triggered "Weird Fits". This situation, much to my dismay, was either something else entirely, or something related but broader.

Medication finally entered the scene and things began to turn around. I was prescribed hydroxyzine–a very weak anti-anxiety pill that gave me a nightly window where my racing thoughts stopped and a light sedating effect welcomed my burning brain into gentle, cool sleep.

Now, in my mind, getting a couple of really good nights of sleep is supposed to fix everything, but apparently the human body doesn't work that way. There's this concept called sleep debt, and if you're not sure what that is, imagine your student loans: you don't pay it off in two nights.

As December crawled forward and I bounced around between a tele-health doctor, psychiatrist, and deliverance minister, I was still sick. And sick in such a way that is very hard to describe to someone who doesn't see me and my energy fluctuations and unusual crying spells day in and day out. On a good day, I had 50% of the energy I used to have to get things done in a day. After that, a deep buzzing fatigue would hit my bones like a truck t-boning a car, alerting me that I was spent. On a bad day, I only left the bedroom to eat, shower, and use the bathroom.

It became abundantly clear that I was not healthy enough to return to Japan, not just in January, but for a year or two at least.

I cried. I yelled at God. I punched my beanbag as hard as I could. I had never tried as hard at anything as I did in the year 2025 when I tried to adjust to Japan and learn the language. God's fingerprints were all over the way we got to Japan, and here I was, collapsed and unable to keep going forward. I couldn't even go back to retrieve a suitcase full of my stuff or get the proper re-entry permit(1).

"WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR?" I shouted.

I don't hear Him often, but this time I heard Him speak to me. He didn't answer that question, but He gave me what I needed to hear and hold onto. An answer that fed my soul in a way I am not capable of doing for myself.

On January 16, Sergey left for Tokyo. His mission is to pack up our apartment, move it into storage, and close down all accounts and obligations there. He'll travel to a couple of small towns to get a feel for where we might want to try living in the future.

But for now, as far as we know, the Japan experiment is over.

There are many pieces to what I am learning in this time period. They can't all be captured in one post, the whole picture will have to be gleaned from the next several posts. However, the primary thing circles around something that happened when I went to deliverance ministry last month.

Sergey and I had already worked through deliverance principles we'd learned by reading Defeating Dark Angels, but each of us had an issue that we couldn't help the other budge. Mine was my health, which always skirted the edge of possibly being a spiritual issue, just enough to make us unsure(2). So we went to the people that the author of that book had left his ministry to.

Meeting with the pastor, I was led through a prayer that asked me to affirm that my conception was a good thing. Deep inside myself, I recoiled from affirming something that I honestly did not believe, and I groaned. I thought I was past this. I thought I didn't hate myself this much anymore.

But, as the pastor explained, this wasn't about what I felt, it was about affirming the truth by my will alongside Jesus. So I did. And when I was walked through an imagined scene where Jesus laid my infant self into my arms as an adult, I looked down at her and thought for the first time, "Oh. Yes, she deserves protection."

And I began to accept that I deserved and needed help. Needed care. Needed to let myself rest before I drove myself to the end of my resources every day.

I'm here in Houston, preparing our house for sale and chasing down leads on my health issues–incrementally. And resting. And reading. And watching movies.

And working, for the first time, on letting myself rest without triple-checking if I'm really out of energy or just being lazy. I'm allowing myself to stop before I've spent every last drop of energy. I'm fighting to say no when it's a bad idea to say yes. I'm trying to stop tying my decisions to whether I'm a good person or not.

In short, I'm trying to care for myself a fraction as much as my husband, who gladly gave up Japan because of the unexplained toll on me.

Maybe the secret to all this isn't fighting my way out as hard as I can. Maybe it's a gentler path and an easier yoke promised in scripture. Isn't that just too good to be true?

re-entry permit(1): When you have a temporary visa in Japan, you have to be very careful when you leave. A temporary re-entry permit obtained at the airport will let you leave and return for up to a year. Longer re-entry permits can only be obtained in Japan in a government office. If you leave the country for longer than your re-entry permit allows, your visa is void and you have to apply from scratch.

just enough to make us unsure(2): We didn’t want to blame demons for biology, but we couldn’t ignore the possibility.