Tokyo, night.
I’m sitting high up in a skyscraper, drink in hand.
Below me, the city pulses with light, millions of lives moving all at once. Tokyo is like that: enormous, alive, almost hypnotic. And I’m up here, alone.
It’s not a sad kind of alone, though. It’s the kind that arrives when you stop for a moment and look at your life from a distance. Like stepping back from a painting to finally see what it actually is.
I’m 38. No partner, no family I’ve built. What I have built is freedom.
I’ve traveled, seen the world, learned to be genuinely okay with myself. I can decide tomorrow morning where to go, what to do, how to live. No negotiations. No compromises. Just me, the next flight, and whatever comes after.
But what even is freedom, now that I actually have it?
I’ve been sitting with that question a lot lately. Because for most of my life, freedom was the destination, the thing I was moving toward. And now that I’m here, in it, living it… it turns out freedom isn’t a place you arrive at. It’s more like a muscle. You have to keep choosing it, keep using it, or it quietly atrophies into just another routine.
For me, freedom is the ability to say I don’t know yet without it being a crisis. It’s waking up in a city I chose for no practical reason. It’s making decisions based on curiosity instead of fear. It’s owning my time like it actually belongs to me.
And here’s the thing, none of this is obvious. None of this is given.
Eighty years ago, in Italy, I couldn’t even vote.
Eighty years. That’s nothing. That’s my grandmother’s lifetime. Women fought, argued, marched, and waited just to have a seat at the table of their own lives. And now here I am: a woman, alone, at the top of a skyscraper in Tokyo, on the other side of the planet, spending money I earned, going where I want, answering to no one.
The audacity of it, honestly.
I don’t take that lightly. Sometimes I think about all the women before me who had a version of this feeling, this wanting, this restlessness, this sense that there was more, and had nowhere to put it. No outlet. No passport. No choice.
So when people ask me if the freedom I’ve chosen is worth it, part of me wants to say: the fact that I get to ask that question at all is already extraordinary.
And yet, looking out at this massive city, one simple, enormous question surfaced anyway:
Is it worth it?
Most of my friends are building something rooted, relationships, families, a place they come back to. I’m still moving through the world. I meet plenty of men, but so many of them seem cut from the same cloth: looking for something fast and surface-level, or already attached elsewhere.
So I catch myself wondering if the person I have in my head actually exists somewhere out there. Someone loyal. Curious. Someone who loves to explore the world, not to escape it, but to understand it. Someone who actually wants to build something.
I don’t feel envy when I look at other people’s lives. It’s more like curiosity.
A quiet I wonder what that version would feel like.
Here’s what I know about freedom: no one warns you that it comes with its own kind of ache.
Not regret. Not loneliness exactly. Something more subtle, a strange tenderness, like a warm blanket with a small tear in the corner.
There’s a tiny tear somewhere inside me tonight. But sitting right next to it? Gratitude.
Because looking at Tokyo from up here, I don’t feel small inside something enormous.
I feel like part of something enormous.
So is freedom the right choice? Is building roots the right choice?
I genuinely don’t think life works that way, like there’s a correct answer waiting to be unlocked if you just make the right moves. The “family and roots” path has its own invisible costs. The “freedom and movement” path has its own invisible aches. Neither one is a cheat code. Both are just different kinds of full.
Maybe the real question isn’t which life is better.
Maybe it’s: which trade-offs can you actually live with?
What I know for myself is this, I still choose the version where I’m in charge of what comes next. Not because it’s easier. Because the alternative, a life I backed into out of fear of being alone, sounds far lonelier to me than any rooftop ever could.
And maybe the life I want isn’t either/or anyway.
Maybe it’s still out there, around a corner I haven’t turned yet.
Tokyo doesn’t know. Neither do I.
But the view from up here is pretty damn good.
——————————-
Veronica,
Currently in Tokyo.
“Where the city never stops, and neither do the questions.“
Work Unplugged 
Leave a comment