the seam ripper

What will I do with the seam ripper? ... and other important decisions about my life.

Before getting to that I want to say how incoherent this writing will be and how it will fail to express all the thoughts and decisions and considerations I’ve weighed which have brought me to this very point in my life. Add to that the fact that I almost never know if I’m making the right decision. Add to that the sadness and longing that always seems to follow me every time I leave something behind.

Fragile, reactionary, emotional, sensitive, hopeless, pointless, aimless.

If this is who I am, then so be it. And yet I feel a tiny flicker of excitement of something different, a new opportunity, a new chance, a new experience. I just know in my heart of hearts that I have not lived enough to stop experiencing something new.

This could possibly be the longest way of saying: “I’m ready to leave Korea.” I always knew that I’d know when I was ready. And now I know. I’m ready. The only goal that I’ve set so far in this regard is that by the time I turn 35 I will no longer be living here.

Just writing that takes my breath away and has caused these miniscule droplets to well up and moisturize my eyes.

For the first time I don’t want to make a list. I just want to accept my feelings and decision without providing details to back up my thought process, though I expect leaving to be hard.

After four years of establishing a life and creating close bonds with amazing people, it’s hard to break that connection, which leaving will undoubtedly do. Yet, the miracle is that I did meet those amazing people who have enriched my experiences in ways that one could only live through to understand.

And after finding a job and filling a role and providing input and becoming important to a process (and this says nothing of the family mentality that working groups have, especially the working family to which I have belonged for the past year) makes it very hard for me to get past the guilt of breaking expectations and leaving behind responsibilities. Yet, the blessing is that I did find that perfect job in Korea for which I had been endlessly searching, made great money and adapted to the Korean working culture.

And then there’s myself and my own self-doubting which is always tossing and turning between the known and unknown. Yet, the reality is that I did move my entire life from my home country to a foreign country four years ago, and achieved my dream of living and working abroad and even studying and mastering a tiny bit of a foreign language.

And so I press-on thinking of the two reasons that stand out far ahead of the rest for wanting to start a new phase of my life …

This needle-in-the-haystack hope lives strong in my fantasy but has been repeatedly proven wrong in reality; well as much as it is possible to prove a possibility and a reason for hope, wrong. Let’s face it – it’s not going to happen in this haystack. Slowing becoming an impossibly unrealizable dream is meeting someone here who ignites hope and possibility; someone with whom there is an undeniable match; someone with whom I can spend the rest of my life. At this point, I see inspiration for finding my needle everywhere else but here.

Next … how much difference a day of health and wellness makes when you have been sick for nearly 4 months straight!? I have sinusitis and enough to say about that for an entire separate discussion, so I’ll just greatly oversimplify everything to save energy: Korea is making me sick.

There it is. The top two seam rippers. Amazingly, the 3 things I love the most about Korea which have kept me here, I still love about Korea: the food, the safety and the opportunity to travel easily and cheaply to other Asian countries.

But I have achieved what I set out to achieve four years ago when I sold my house and everything in it and bought a one way ticket to Korea. And my life in Korea could not get any better than it is and it’s completely saturated with cherished friends, memorable moments, cultural awareness and once in a lifetime experiences; the stuff of great stories and enough anecdotal material to make the book that I just might write one day, touching. Now my goals are different. I want to be healthy and I want to find my someone special. A new environment is in order.

In deciding to leave Korea I’ve made a very huge decision that was difficult and emotional; however, even more difficult and potentially more emotional will be the several smaller decisions that I’ll be making to get from this point in my life to the next. If you think someone couldn’t (or if they could, wouldn’t) attach meaning and emotion to such an insignificant item as a seam ripper, then 안녕하세요. 만나서 반갑습니다.