Michael liked to think of himself as a realist. He wasn't as bad as some of the coders he knew who seemed to want to boil everything down to absolutes, but, almost certainly, a realist. To his mind, there was very little way to sugarcoat the situation he found himself in.
Instead, he simply tried to make the best of it. He rationalized that even when he'd had his freedom, most of his time was spent bathed in the light of his computer monitor and not in the light of the sun. But still, there were things he missed. There were things he knew he should be doing, experiencing as part of a 'normal' life and as much as he liked Japan, it was still…well, foreign. He was sheltered from a lot inside Raven's Flat, but there was very much a feel of the 'other' about some of the simplest of things.
Even so, he, for the most part, thought that he had adapted well. He hadn't noticeably screwed up his etiquette or done anything to elicit a confused stare from one of his coworkers in quite a while. He even thought he was coping with it, with the strain of captivity in a strange place. Then one day he realized he wasn't thinking in English anymore, and the walls closed in a little tighter.