Dear Korea,

You’ve taught me how to love and forgive myself more. Lessons I should have embraced a long time ago. The little girl inside me is starting to heal in ways I never thought possible.

It’s been a very emotional time for me since moving to Seoul. Today as I finally got around to hanging up clothes from their previous home of my suitcase, I realized that I’m revisiting old feelings and memories. I look at this as part of the healing process. Everyone has old wounds from some point in their life. Growing up as a minority where I lived had a significant impact on how I thought I needed to look and who I needed to be. I tried to assimilate and blend in as much as possible because I didn’t see myself as Korean, but the world did. The world saw me differently and treated me differently. Isn’t it crazy how we as humans treat others based on how we look?

When I was a teenager I had contact lenses of various colors, anything different than my natural eye color which I hated. I despised looking Asian having dark eyes, small eyes that didn’t look like anyone else’s. This time in my life, as with most teenagers, was the hardest period of coming to terms with my identity and molding myself into what I thought was the right person or at least the person I thought I wanted to be or needed to be for others, not necessarily for myself. In Korea there are contact lenses stores everywhere and reminded me of this time in my life. When I saw those places I wondered had I grown up in Korea, if I would have wanted to change my eye color so badly to look different. Regardless how I felt then, this morning I broke down in tears again realizing that I had been so hard on myself when I was younger, angry and depressed because I didn’t know who I was or needed to be or look like. So I continued to hate the way I looked and who I was and these were the feelings and memories I revisited.

Of course this is something I’ve thought about in the past but when you’re in a foreign country, THE foreign country where you were born among people who look exactly like you well, things you thought before come back into your mind differently. You gain perspective and there are moments when you forgive yourself.

“When you understand, that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.” 

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

It’s both frightening and exhilarating all at once to look back at your life and understand that you have the power to change and rewrite who you become in the future. This morning I realized that I have not loved myself enough throughout my life and grew up never feeling confident in who I was because I didn’t know any better. But that’s partly why I came to Korea, to rebuild those parts of me.