Woah… I love it!! Thanks for sharing this!!
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The meaning of life is to give life meaning! Happiness is not taking yourself so seriously…
Like others have said, there’s a way you can become very zen about it through meditation.
I would recommend putting your goals to your subconscious, and forcing yourself to count on them that way. Write your affirmation (just like a personal code), as if you were a drill instructor yelling, “You will make it to Japan one day!” and then Yell it to the world at yourself!
All you do after that is tear apart the paper you used to write your affirmation and then it’ll always be within you! Any time you are even slightly confused your mind will come up with the answer, because it’s trying to serve your chosen outcome.
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I also arrived back from Japan a few days ago. It was a truly amazing trip and I hope to come back somewhere next year perhaps. I practiced Japanese a bit but I give up easily and barely spoke any Japanese except for thanking people for their service and such. bit of a downer 
I hope I can motivate myself to practice more so that next time I can actually communicate better there.
So that is how I am trying to motivate myself. To be better everytime I visit 
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That’s a great thing to focus on. Even though my communication was… adequate… I would love to reach a point where I don’t have to ask for anything in English! Keep pumping away my friend.
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Did everyone here just arrive back from Japan a few days ago? 
I managed to accomplish most things in Japanese on this trip, actually, an on my last trip back in December - not to toot my own horn, but some conversations went so smoothly that in my memory, they happened in English, even though I’m pretty certain we were speaking in Japanese at the time. I do confess I was starting to get a bit of Japanese fatigue towards the end, though, and the simplest of phrases were starting to escape my memory - I gave the umbrellas we’d purchased in Japan to our hotel staff so we wouldn’t have to drag them home on the plane, but afterwards I realised that instead of telling them “I don’t want to take these umbrellas back home” I instead said “I don’t want to go home by means of these umbrellas”.
Also, I tend to get in Japanese mode so thoroughly that when people speak to me in English, I honestly can’t understand them. Like, my brain goes “what on earth does ‘ウェア アー ユー フロム’ mean? I’m not sure I’ve learnt that Japanese yet.” And I’m hard of hearing, so frequently when I don’t hear what they said, they’ll try to repeat it in English, when the problem is simply that I didn’t hear rather than that I didn’t understand.
I also feel I still need to work at my あいづち. And I keep saying 大丈夫です when いえ、結構です would be more appropriate.
When I got back from my first trip to Japan 2 years ago I was depressed for 1 week, like really depressed.
I saw somewhere that it’s called reverse culture shock syndrome and it happens with a place you might visit that really click with you.
But it had the opposite effect on me, I decided to work way harder and spend more time on my Japanese studies.
But hey, you will get over it, you only need time and you will want to go back too like I did.
I will be on my third trip to Japan in July 
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Well, as for me, I’m not sure if I’d ever be able to visit Japan at all…
But I still want to learn Japanese, because it has been my dream since early childhood 
Anyway, good luck with your studies and motivation!
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Woah, really? I actually had the exact opposite happen to me, and I was so thankful for it. I would say the ol’ “wakarimasen” or “yukkuri kudasai” and they would totally be patient with me and repeat it in slower, or simpler,Japanese (sorry for the romaji, at work and I don’t have the Japanese keyboard installed). It’s funny because I’ve heard from so many people that you’ll barely get to practice your Japanese because you’ll be addressed in English, but I seriously was only ever addressed in English only when I asked if English was okay. Maybe it has something to do with the Kansai region? I was in Osaka, Nara, and Kyoto.
Probably the issue is that I don’t say “yukkuri kudasai” but rather just my usual reflex of “… huh?”.
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