At 26, I lost everything—and started my life over♯２
When I was 26, it was the hardest year of my life.
I had been in a relationship for 7 years.
We were even engaged, and I truly believed we would get married.
But one day, I was told:
“I met someone else.”
And just like that, it ended.
Honestly, it felt like everything collapsed.
Everything I believed in disappeared in an instant.
Even so,
I thought to myself,
“I don’t want to end here.”
So I decided to give everything I had to my business.
At first, things didn’t go well.
But little by little, sales started to grow.
I began to think,
“Maybe this can actually work.”
But then,
I was betrayed there too.
I was betrayed by my business partner,
and I lost everything.
My relationship, my work—
Everything I had believed in fell apart.
26 was truly a devastating year.
But looking back now,
losing everything at that time
is what finally made me face my life.
With just one feeling—
“I don’t want to end like this”—
I decided to go to Australia to study coffee.
Of course, I learned a lot about coffee—
the knowledge and the skills.
But more than that,
what changed the most was my perspective on life.
Back in Japan,
I didn’t realize how much I was trapped by ideas like
“this is how things should be” or “this is normal.”
And then one day,
it felt like something hit me hard.
“What if life doesn’t have a fixed meaning at all?”
That’s what I thought.
And because of that,
I realized that the meaning of life isn’t something given to you—
it’s something you decide for yourself.
And living true to yourself
is what matters most.
In Australia,
I met so many people who were living their lives freely,
in their own way.
And for the first time, I thought:
“My life can be more free than this.”
When I felt that,
I finally felt like I could move forward, even just a little.
If you’ve lost something,
or if things aren’t going your way right now—
that’s not the end.
It might actually be the beginning.
To those who feel like
“I can’t do this anymore”—
just like I once did—
I want to say this:
Life can be restarted, as many times as you need.
So if there’s even a small part of you
that wants to change something—
don’t ignore that feeling.
