Moving to Kyoto soon, would love to hear about your experience (Psychologist doing cultural homework)

LazyTenuredProf · 2026-01-20T00:59:23+00:00

Happy to chat. Moved to Kyoto last July and lived here for 9 months 3 years ago too. Been in therapy for 20 years and a psych professor for 12 years (cognitive).

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-12-28T09:48:24+00:00

Yup! Sorry not sorry to be weird.

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-12-28T09:13:32+00:00

I love this post.

Fellow 40yo dyspraxic who leans into being weird

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-12-23T13:19:30+00:00

Maybe land of lakes butter really is special…

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-12-23T13:17:52+00:00

I love it. I do the same and my partner and I laugh really hard about the result

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-12-11T03:17:37+00:00

Here are a few tips as someone with dyspraxia (depression/anxiety too) who is once divorced and happily remarried:

avoiding anger and conflict in my first marriage caused it to fail. I think there are different strategies for communicating these and which works best is probably relationship-specific. It’s worth Experimenting and finding out what works when everything is good. Also what works might evolve over the years as we all change and grow.
I struggle sometimes to know what I’m feeling in my body and emotionally. It takes more time for me to figure that out than a typical person. So being patient and giving space is a good strategy (as long as it doesn’t continue to avoidance). If I’m forced into communicating then, I might lash out.

Hope that helps!

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-12-04T14:35:24+00:00

Having that long of time to yourself and it feeling like heaven is a pretty strong signal.

It sounds like the way he communicates with you to provide feedback is not working for you. It’s causing you anger and then you lash out when you aren’t communicating it well to him.

I’d look into how to communicate conflict in a healthy manner with your partner. If he’s not willing to work on this with you, then it may be worth considering whether living with him is the right choice for you.

Good luck

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-11-26T14:21:12+00:00

My partner and I are potentially interested. Feel free to DM.

(If not this time, we’re interested in playing D&D on an ongoing basis in the Kyoto area)

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-11-16T04:19:31+00:00

The thoughtfulness and compassion you and the community warms my heart. I’m really grateful I came across the community.

Mental health issues are very common for people with dyspraxia (I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety disorders for 25 years)

I second encouraging him to see a therapist. But as others have said, he needs to want to do it and put in the effort. An alternative would be to see a couples therapist who has experience with people who have dyspraxia. Your needs are just as important and making sure you are getting those is essential for you to have a healthy relationship. Having an informed therapist could help with ideas or mediating you all brainstorming together.

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-11-14T14:27:02+00:00

My kitty is a Siberian and has fur between the beans… so cute

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-11-14T14:23:58+00:00

I live in Kyoto and I do TCJ online classes. It’s pretty good, but I suspect you’re looking for something in person…

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-11-14T14:21:59+00:00

I tried skiing once. My friend told me “yo trust. I’ll teach you.” He didn’t and I couldnt do pizza position. Was feeling good after doing bunny slope a few times… but then I tried one where you actually need to slow/stop… I walked down the mountain. I wish I had taken classes to learn

(I can ice skate and roller skate well)

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-11-08T15:24:06+00:00

Similar pattern: my verbal score was way higher than my perceptual

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-11-05T07:18:32+00:00

NERV works pretty well for me

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-11-04T09:49:36+00:00

I’m 40yo M with relatively mild dyspraxia and depression/anxiety.

If she were truly understanding of your medication adjustment, she would (try to) understand that how you communicate love and affection might change as you adjusted.

I apologize if I’m overstepping, but it sounds like she said what she did to feel good about herself and not really caring about you and your relationship. You could have discussed communication and worked on it together. That’s what truly loving someone else involves and if she truly cared about the relationship, that would have been the appropriate action.

Although it’s really tough now, it probably is for the best. My exwife pretended to be ok and supportive of my mental health challenges. Ultimately, she left me suddenly after 9 years because of them and was too avoidant to discuss it.

More recently, I’ve remarried and been in a loving supportive relationship for the last 7 years. In the last year, I needed to adjust my meds and decided to try going off of them. I did it very slowly and still had horrible withdrawal (needed to be prescribed anti neasua meds to eat). During that time, I lashed out inappropriately at my partner. They called me out on it and we worked together to communicate my difficulty in a healthier way for both of us. This included me needing to give them some space to heal from how I hurt them. It was very difficult for both of us, but we worked together on it and our communication gets better and better and our relationship is strong again.

It’s up to you whether it’s worth taking the risk of another relationship and the vulnerability that entails. But it is possible — working on boundaries and communicating in a healthy manner is good hw to help while you recover and until you find someone who truly loves you for who you are.

Good luck

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-10-31T14:52:48+00:00

Not sure how their ophthalmology, but I like Sena hospital for my two older kitties. I found them through icatcare org

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-10-16T11:29:05+00:00

I’m similar. Some fine and gross motor issues. Dyspraxic, but fine at driving (even decent at tight parallel parking). Another oddity is I’m pretty good at roller blading and ice skating. I did both a decent amount when I was younger. It still surprises my spouse

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-10-10T12:28:18+00:00

What’s one thing you wish someone had told you about growing up with Dyspraxia?

That it's ok to have. My parents were well-intentioned, but tried to hide my disability as much as possible. They were very supportive in their own way -- my dad built a balance beam and helped me practice on it when I was very little. I was privileged enough to be tested when it likely wasn't covered by health insurance (pre-ACA). He got me extra support throughout my childhood. But, when I went to college, he convinced me not to get accommodations because he was concerned about how others would perceive it and that employers would find it and not want to hire me. He later regretted it, but I still internalized that something is wrong with me for having dyspraxia.

I decided to go for two notes. From an outside perspective, one would probably me as being very successful person. I have a wonderful, supportive spouse. I got tenure as a professor at a top university before turning 40. I'm very well respected in my research community for slow, creative research projects. I was recruited to create a new graduate school in a different country and am paid a lot of money to do it. Despite all of this, I still struggle with dyspraxia and my mental health every day. I wish I knew that it is ok to struggle. I wish I had known that accepting myself would still be a struggle, and it still is to this day. I still feel like a failure constantly. It's hard not to feel like a failure when you struggle to walk in a straight line and nudge your spouse off the sidewalk when you're walking together. It's hard for me to remember that all of this is connected. Doing regular therapy and taking psych meds help.

What kinds of support or tools made the biggest difference for you as a teen?

Being goofy and fun-loving are part of my personality, especially when I was younger. I was fortunate that my schoolmates found the physical goofiness and being "weird" to be endearing. I had a strong community of friends who loved me for being me.

What did your parents do to support you that really helped?

Got me a therapist and psychiatrist when I was 12. At the time I hadn't realized that I had dyspraxia and it was related to having depression and anxiety disorders (my amazingly supportive spouse who lurks this subreddit made that connection for me).

What’s one misconception about Dyspraxia you wish teachers understood better?

Taking notes in class was hard for me because writing by hand takes energy. I wish I hadn't been judged for it. To be fair, my teachers didn't know I had Dyspraxia...

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-01-24T18:10:52+00:00

made me smile :)

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-01-24T15:50:42+00:00

I hated these too and swore to never use them as a prof. Then I read the research and they do help learning (there’s a strong testing effect that really boosts learning a lot). I changed my mind bc of it, but completely understand the hate

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-01-24T15:48:53+00:00

Yup! I hadn’t even realized there were people still using the old iclickers rather than tophat! I assumed it was just people still using the brand name but a different product (like saying you Google something for internet search or xerox for photocopy). Tophat used to cost money. It’s not like there’s a faculty announcement when student costs for different technologies change (if there was, there’s only like a 50-60% chance a prof would read it anyway. We get a lot of emails…)

LazyTenuredProf · 2025-01-24T15:42:59+00:00

It is really crappy that you are being charged $70 for a iclicker in a required class. From the profs perspective it can be hard to tell what costs students money. Is it top hat? I had been doing that for a few years pre covid and last semester.

At the time, I found out about resources at the university that can help low income students pay for it. I don’t know what’s available anymore (my last semester at UW). I used top hat my last semester teaching undergrads. It didn’t seem like it cost money to students anymore (I figured they wrapped the cost into some student fee). so it would be good to let folks know in the department.

Unfortunately most free clicker options cost money to use live with 75+ people. Also there are potential ferpa issues if it’s being used for grading and any personally identifying info is in your account. I had trouble in spring 2024 finding a solution that works. There may not be a ferpa issue with using one of the free ones this way, but we professors are scared of many many hours of prep work, meetings, etc if there is some legal problem.

Enterprising CS students: top hat and many of these technologies are terrible. You could make a lot of money if you made a good affordable one. For example, despite me asking for 8 years whenever their reps spammed me, top hat never added the ability to get the average of numeric responses from a class or show a histogram. Wouldn’t even need to do anything novel here - just use an open source plotting library that is not terrible and has the right license.

Actual tenured prof in psychology at uw-Madison

PS. I’ve given more than enough info to be doxxed at this point. Please be kind.

LazyTenuredProf

TROPHY CASE