Venting:suffering and difficult studying in Japan

It feels like life is becoming meaningless. I’m only a few years away from turning 30.
This article may seem chaotic because English is not my first language, and I am also struggling with mental illness.

I passed N1 and attending a senmon gakko studying illustration. YES—it feels like hell. Not because of the school or the subject itself, but because of the stress. I have low self esteem.

I come from a very controlling family. Still, they allowed me to study art in my home country. I even earned a university degree in a creative field. However, I’ve always been more interested in and better at illustration. I know I’m not the best, but I used to have pretty good grades.

Growing up i having mental health problems mainly because of my family. Before coming to Japan, I worked as a designer.I want to get away with them so i went to Japan, a place that they agreed and i knew for years.(I already got N3 and friends lives here before coming)

Soon, I discovered that I have no sense of personal identity at all after leaving my family. The stress is crushing me, and life in Japan is difficult too—with low salaries and inefficiency compared to where I’m from. I thought I could overcome it, but things got worse. After starting medication, I found that I can no longer draw or be creative. (One reason I came to Japan was because I didn’t want my family to know about my illness—they would never allow me to see a doctor.)

I’m lucky to have some supportive friends here, but I’m also afraid of people. My mental state is not stable enough to communicate much with Japanese people. Tokyo already feels full of depressed people, and i am afraid that i am not broken enough.

Because of financial reasons, and because I still have some soft feelings toward them, I can’t fully cut ties with my family. In reality, I try to fix things by limiting contact with them and starting to interact with more japanese, but it’s very hard.

After breaking up with my partner and going through a busy semester, my body and mind feel like they are at the point of collapse. I feel like I’ll never be able to do anything again. I ended up calling my family again, only to be blamed for not earning money, for being useless and ugly. I know they will never change. And yet, they still provide me with financial support despite all the toxic things they say.

I haven’t written much about the difficulties of living in Japan, mainly because I’ve tried to forget about them. But one recent problem is that I was almost scammed by a daikō company—they kept calling me EVERYDAY even after I asked them to stop.

At this point, I don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t go back home either, because there would be no one to support me.