My Solo Exchange Diary

This is going to be one of those rambling reviews where I barely talk about the work, I apologize beforehand.

First of all, I accidentally read this before My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, and that is because I'm an idiot and I started reading the first book first but then stopped somewhere mid pandemic on an accident, resumed with the one I'm currently reviewing, stopped again and finally went to pick this one up to finish it lmao. Look the covers just looked too similar. Anyway, the theme of having an exchange diary with yourself hits very close to home because I've been doing the same thing with myself since 2009 or so, through a page called futureme. I haven't done it in a couple of years now, and christ the new page design is horrid, but I used to love doing it so much. Sending myself a letter every 6 months to a year or so, seeing how much I've changed.. I need to go re-read those emails now. I used it the most when I was a 6th grader at the height of my NLOG phase, the e-mails are hilarious now. Ok done going through them, wew.

This manga is mostly about the authors anxieties. Well, it's more about how her life is pro(re)gressing, but it always comes back to the same couple of issues that keep plaguing her. It's pretty repetitive and the chapters keep circling around the same already stated points. It makes sense of course, since this is kind of a stream of consciousness technique in manga form, almost. I mean, can you say your thoughts are much different? I can't. I relate to many of the things the author feels, which is a bit frustrating. I feel a lot of compassion for her, but I also feel enraged by her. Well anyway, that is not the main thing I wanted to write about in here.

The main topic I want to ramble about is basically how embarrassing it must feel to air out your dirty laundry for the whole world to see - and have your family be aware of it and be aware of the fact that they're included in that work of yours. How does one write something like that, and then continue on with their lives? This manga is the window into one such experience. Personally, if that was me, I'd find that incredibly stress inducing and judging by this work, Nagata did too LOL. In a way it's freeing, but at the same time... Man... What you share as an author, especially if you write auto-biographical stuff, seems like such a touchy subject especially if you're writing about it as it is happening. No hate to Nagata but I can't imagine being her parents and knowing she said what she said (and then changed her mind a couple of times) or being that girl she met online and almost kind of had a relationship with... I'm getting hit with that small-town mentality thing "WHAT WILL THE VILLAGE THINK???". Whenever I watch videos on tiktok for example and I find them funny or goofy, or I watch some kind of a pretty personal story time video and again I find it funny and agreeable or whatever - sometimes I find myself thinking - what if I knew this person making the video irl? If they were behaving the way they did in that video, I'd find them incredibly cringy, and as someone I wouldn't confide in. But somehow since its tiktok and I'm watching them as a stranger, I don't find it as hard to watch. My friend and I stalk this random girl from her town on tiktok from time to time. She makes ~aesthetic~ videos about how she's such an edgy poor student having a hard time (she's not poor), nothing too offensive, but to us it's rage inducing. Yet, if she was a random girl from idk, London, making those same videos I probably wouldn't give it a second thought, even if she was a rich girl larping to be poor. Well, this manga made me feel pretty strong second hand embarassment at points anyways, probably because I projected on Nagata a bit too much... Actually, I see her as a worse version of myself. Yeah that's probably it...

I went off on a tangent here, but I truly think this is a good piece of work dealing with this exact issue, and how doing something like this can make you feel like you made a rift between you and your family and friends, especially if you lack anonymity. This shit makes for an awkward situation no matter how you look at it.

Despite being really repetitive in its subject matter, Nagata tries to make it interesting with a ton of little allegories and comparisons, her illustrations are really cute, and they have a specific look to them because of her signature black/white + pink shading/coloring. Even still, I found this manga to be a hard read because of everything I mentioned earlier, which explains why I picked it up and dropped it twice. I'll try reading the rest of her work at some point too, but I have to get in the right mindset for it.