となりの雑談 EP.197「マイナスをゼロに」

Months of Dental Treatment as the Starting Point

Sakuchan spent months going back and forth to the dentist, finally fixing a poorly fitting crown and a collection of cavities she had been putting off for years. Deciding to "just fix everything at once" — rather than leaving work that was functional-but-flawed alone — was, she says, a distinctly forty-something kind of call. Su-san had been making weekly dentist trips around the same time and met the observation with an easy "that's just the age we're at."

The Structure of Effort: "Turning Minus into Zero"

While working through treatment, Sakuchan put language to something she had long felt. "Fixing a cavity is turning minus into zero, isn't it?" All the effort she has made since becoming an adult, she realized, has been the work of returning problems and shortcomings back to zero — not advancing, just recovering ground.

When Su-san talks about pushing herself, she tends to mean making something already good even better. Sakuchan's version of effort sits one step before that. She uses the image of shoring up a shaky foundation: building a beautiful structure on unstable ground will only lead to collapse later. From the outside it may look like she is refusing to build at all, but the groundwork is, to her, non-negotiable. She adds another analogy: before you teach a drowning person how to swim, you have to get them to shore.

The Complex of Not Doing "Normal" Things — and the Words That Freed Her

Sakuchan has carried a long-standing complex around the ordinary social competencies she simply cannot manage — things like serving salad for the table or handling back-office administrative work. From childhood she was always either too much or too little; never comfortably in the middle.

Some years into adulthood, a friend her own age said: "Let the ordinary people handle the ordinary things." It became a turning point and remains an anchor for her today. From that moment she stopped trying to fill that particular gap entirely.

She is careful, though, to distinguish this from "giving up on a weak subject." Not being able to do something others can do is fine as long as you can do something else — you won't die. But the holes she is talking about are a different order of problem: they are ground-level, the kind that leave you unable to stand at all. It is not about accepting weaknesses and playing to strengths; it is about cementing the foundation that is genuinely indispensable.

Caring for Her Father, Raising a Child Alone, and the Wants Put on Hold

As concrete examples of those holes, Sakuchan names two: the years she spent caring for her ailing father, pouring time and money into it, and the years after her child was born when, as a single mother with limited working hours, she absolutely had to earn income. For a long stretch, "pursuing what I want" simply was not on the table. Because of that, she had convinced herself she had no particular wants — but she now understands that was not true. She was simply asking them to wait. "The feeling was: I have holes I have to fill first. Could my wants please hold on?"

Whitening and the First Step toward Plus

Once every piece of treatment was complete, Sakuchan signed up for teeth whitening. It is the first investment she has ever made in something she does not need — a step, for the first time, into positive territory. She is following the process as she has been told, but a nagging feeling remains: "Is this really okay?" She finds herself scanning for more urgent problems she ought to be spending the money on instead, and admits that guilt around spending on a non-essential has not fully lifted.

Su-san calls it a big deal that she moved in that direction at all. Sakuchan senses her resistance is stronger around money than time, but she is beginning to feel the effects: spending on herself sends her self-esteem up almost embarrassingly fast, enables bolder decisions, and opens doors that were previously closed. A luxury body wash and an impulse-buy wallet are among the small experiments along those lines. As she approaches her forty-eighth birthday, both hosts close out the episode with the same wish — to spend the coming decades doing everything they want to do, and to end having had a good time.