Dear Korea,

You’re helping me reflect on the person I’ve been and develop the person I want to become.

Identity is considered a person’s conception and expression of their own (self-identity) and others’ individuality or group affiliations (national identity and cultural identity). So developing your identity, as you might guess, is an evolving natural progression. This applies to everyone, not just Korean Adoptees. Every individual has their own unique experience, but I think there are more commonalities that exist between all of us that many realize.

I honestly never thought about identity as much as I have in the past few years, and something I realized was that I had no idea what it meant to be Korean. I’m American. I’ll always be American. But what does that mean? What parts of me are American? What parts of me are Korean? These were all the questions I couldn’t answer, but I knew coming to Korea was what I needed to start. And even though I might not find all the answers, I needed this experience to teach me how to develop my own sense of identity.