I’d been waking up in this bed for 17 years now, in a land so alien to me when I first arrived that it had created deep within me equal amounts of fear and excitement, both in their rawest forms. This was a place where I felt nothing of the world around me and from this I found great solace, a numbed reality. People always described China to me as being a ‘culture shock’ however I came here and took it upon myself to undergo a cultural reinvention – a rejection of all I had known previous.  My home had felt stagnant and unappealing for much of my adolescence and as thus I never intended to stay grounded. Nevertheless my striking choice to move to the Far East was no bold adventure; it was simply a regression into a state of complete disassociation only made possible by such a decision, such a radical change in scenery. I have never fully integrated into the society I chose to place myself in and so never feel any want or need to leave, it was the disappointing nature of human interaction that made me leave my birthplace in the first place. To this day I know little of anybody I once knew, how they now live or even how they reacted to my exit, in this lack of knowledge I find bliss. If I were to know then this little bubble of ignorance I have created for myself would be popped – the illusion destroyed.