Connections

My recent blogs have been heavy and full of emotion. I have found that writing affords me a space to emote in ways that feel relieving and safe. I am able to convey what's truly inside in ways that I can't in talking it out. It has been extremely therapeutic and every now and then I laugh to myself because while I am extremely picky and guarded about who I talk to and how much I tell them, I can write my whole life in such intricate and descriptive detail for anyone...ANYONE...to read, and feel relatively at peace with this.

I've made some big changes in my life recently. In recent weeks - or week even, I made yet another change that I feel truly closed the door on a very challenging series of moments I was enduring. Closing this door has given me my freedom back. It's given me my full range of happiness and calm back. It's given me my own sense of self back. With a change in jobs, a new place to live, acceptance into a PhD program, my professional and academic life have been wonderful and new and exciting opportunities await. The new space I now call home is wonderful and is filled with such positive and peaceful energy. Just what I need! And I've cleaned up my personal life alot, and as a result, I think I've tuned into myself more. I've been talking more openly and honestly with a few people close to me about all of this and I have realized alot about myself and my patterns. It's helped reconnect me with me - a constant work in progress, but rather than just going through the steps somewhat disassociated, I am actually completely present as I move through them. I actually feel like this is the happiest I have been in a long time. And while these changes that have been happening in my life are positive, I think it's because I feel much more deeply connected to myself right now than I ever have before.

I am reminded of one of my most favorite movie quotes: "My life as I knew it capsized, and then strangely enough, righted itself."

I am getting ready to travel to San Francisco this weekend for work. I'll be gone for a week. It just struck me today how I will be going back to the place that marked my first re-entry back into the US from Korea back in August. I never got to explore the town, I just had a 3 hour layover at the airport. I am excited to see all that San Francisco has to offer. Having never been outside the airport, it is a place that feels familiar to me. I never thought for a moment about the connection and meaning of this place with my travels back from Korea. It surprised me a bit of how it just popped into my head. Right now my thoughts on this sound like a constant buzzing or whirring. I can't quite pull out the various pieces. I just know that something's stirring. I think it will be interesting to see how things unfold while I am there.

As I've been moving into a more centered place in my life, it's allowed me to think more about my Korea trip, my adoptee identity, and I've let myself ask questions to the Universe. I don't find any solid answers of course, but the curious side of me is coming out and I feel strong enough to actually wonder, aloud at times, the wonders I have about these connections in my life. It feels good to tune in to me. I also have had some pretty incredible support - support that has been right in front of my face for a long time - I just never tuned into that frequency.

Onward I go.

Truth Through the Lens of an Old Camera

Neatly perched atop a dusty shelf on my desk in my home office are 6 old cameras. As I sit and stare at them, it's hard to believe anyone ever knew how to properly work them with all their manual dials, knobs, slots, and winders. Today our ability to capture images requires a media card and the ability to push a button. Machines and computer programs that get easier and easier to use allow us to manipulate that moment in life. No longer are we freezing these moments in time. Rather, we are continually re-shaping, re-molding, and re-designing what was supposed to be.

What have these old cameras seen? Have they captured monumental pieces of history? Did they witness new beginnings or endings we can only hope were filled with accomplishment and peace? Have they seen the landscape before it was decimated and forever scarred with highways, industrial sites, and buried toxins that poison the life around it? What truths have these cameras captured?


Truth. The older I get, the more foreign of a concept this seems to be. What is the truth? How do we actually know it's the truth? What was the origination of the meaning of something? How do we ever know that this is truly how it was meant to be or that this is what truly is? Most of the time it seems we course through our lives in such a haphazard way that we have evolved to think is systematic and smooth. My truth is that I am constantly trying to dodge bullets, but sometimes I get shot. I am trying to maneuver through the crowded noise that is the chaos in my head that keeps me up at night when I am beyond the point of exhaustion, but sometimes I am swallowed up. I whip around corners so fast holding the wheel with all my might so as to not fly off the road, but sometimes I lose control and find myself flipping end over end, most of the time landing upside down beaten and bloodied. I get the best running start I can to jump over the holes scattered throughout life or to be able to mount a seemingly insurmountable wall, but sometimes I fall through the holes or I go barreling into those walls at full speed. Yet with each knock down, each scrape, each cut, each bruise, each broken bone or broken heart, I continue to get up and move on. How is this possible? My body hurts, my heart hurts, and my core feels as if it's got nothing left. But, it's as if there is something inside me that I cannot see, touch, or even feel on any recognizable level that fuels my quest for happiness and fulfillment. And for some reason, I need to endure such horrendous battles in hopes...HOPES...of finding that place of peace and fulfillment - even when I just want to lie down and dissolve into the air.

From the day I was born, or at least two days after when I know I arrived at the receiving home in Korea, I have been lied to. I have been lied to about the most important and crucial things that life is built upon - a stable foundation of love, caring, safety, and belonging. I do not know the story of why I was given up, or even taken for that matter. I know that everything that it took to take care of me as a newborn was someone's job and that I just became something to check off on a list. I was a procedure, a schedule, a routine to earn a paycheck and to provide money to my own birth country who allowed for me to be sold. I was set aside or ignored for convenience or lack of ability to pay attention to me.

Growing up I was told lies, my whole adoptive family was told these same lies, about who I was and how I came to belong in their home now. This precious little child with no one who wanted her because they loved her and cared for her. This precious little child who didnt have the comfort of a mother's arms for the first part of her life. This precious little child who spent those early months with strangers knowing nothing else but to instinctually trust, but having that trust repeatedly violated or not returned. This precious little child whose life and well-being were thrown up to the Universe to take care of. She had no control and she had no say of her own.

As I moved through my life, this trust issue has always plagued me. The lies continue today as I search for the missing pieces of my life. I am still not given answers by those I have allowed myself to trust and given my whole heart to. I am still lied to and ignored because it's convenient for someone else or they have decided I take up too much space in their lives. I'm still tossed aside and in some cases, given up or thrown away. I continually assess myself and ask, "is it me?" Why do these foundational things in life that create those feelings of healthy dependency, security, trust, honesty, belonging, and love come as such hard painful lessons for me? I have a relationship with someone - any kind of relationship - friendship, familial, romantic - and something always happens as soon as I allow these people to be close to me. There's always some kind of violation of trust through lying and leaving that results in a loss that cuts so deep that the wounds have never healed. I'm 33 years old and still mourning my infancy!

It will take me a long time to open up and let someone in. I spent alot of my life disassociating from my feelings because I didnt like what was in there. I didnt know how to feel them. Instead, I got angry. I'm good at being angry. The primitive part of my brain, that has learned since I was an infant that people will undoubtedly lie to you and leave you, kicks into overdrive and goes into self-protection mode. I get angry and live there for awhile because then I dont have to feel helpless, vulnerable, and insecure. I dont have to feel 33 years worth of pain from the lies and the abandonment. If I do eventually open up, and there have been only a few times where this has actually happened - so few I could count them on less than one hand - without fail it always ends horribly and my heart is crushed. Why I keep putting it out there is beyond me. A person can only have this kind of bad luck so many times. It must be me!


I've never claimed perfection in my life. I am far from it. I am a continually evolving work in progress. I've visited and revisited, for many years, the trauma of my early moments of life and some of the major devastating and tragic experiences I have had. Healing has been a slow painful process and while I am not by any means completely healed, I have opened alot of doors into my own emotional realm and my memory that were so long sealed shut I had forgotten about them. Once opened, literally, it was like the flood gates had collapsed and there was no holding back. Yet still, I am left asking why? Why do I continually get doors slammed in my face and dropped when I have made myself vulnerable and opened my heart and my emotions to trust and love? Is it all connected? If so, how? More importantly, how do I fix it?

So what is really true I ask? Where in my life can I say I have actually had anything built from a place of original honesty and love? With the kind of shaky, inaccurate, and untrustworthy foundation I have been put upon, is there really any hope for me or will I just always crash through my life with tumbles, spills, and wipe outs that will always leave me bruised and bloodied? Will my heart ever find the kind of pure honesty and peace that it deserved when it was just beginning or will my quest always come up short because that's all I have known? If I trust and love, I will be dropped, left, abandoned. If I reinstate the keep-everyone-at-an-arm's-length-away rule I will never feel that biting, stinging, stabbing, relentless pain, but I will also never feel those beautiful moments, however fleeting, of what I think are brief tastes of what that kind of honesty, trust, and love can feel like. It's a hard decision.

As I stare into the lenses of these old cameras collecting more dust while they sit in silence, retired long ago from their functionality and purpose, I wonder what they see when they look at me. If they could snap a picture now, what would my moment in my life right now look like? And how do I move on from this place of doubt and hurt knowing that while I most certainly will, without fail, likely find myself here once again asking the same questions? It's a weird mix of optimism and pessimism that I can't quite make sense of. I think I need to work on adopting the philosophy of these old cameras - capturing the moment for what it is and nothing more - no interpretation, no manipulation - just what it is in that exact moment.

Message in a Bottle

Inspired by my friend's play "Lost and Found" about various experiences and identity intersections of Korean adoptees.

Dear Korea,

My life journey over the past 30-some years has ranged from smooth, hill-less-ness, and straight, to meandering - wandering even - to seemingly impossible climbs and insurmountable walls. I've walked through parts of my life with relative ease. I've run into open arms sometimes and away from frightening arms other times. Sometimes I've even run from myself. I've crawled slowly through many complexities and over fragile ground. And I've even dragged myself through some of the sharpest of thorns, reaching desperately for something solid and stable to cling to. In some ways I have been given incredible opportunities to have new experiences and expand my life. In some ways I have felt slowed down, halted, and even stunned and hurt by painful and agonizing experiences and truths. It's been a long haul of glorious moments and many hurdles. In those moments that I am the most exhausted, the most miserable, and the most defeated, something wills me to continue to put one foot in front of the other and press on.

Returning to you has been one of the most, if not the most, significant experiences of my life so far. In the month and a half that encapsulates my preparation leading up to my return, the two week time period I was embraced by you, and the couple of weeks back in Minnesota, my entire being went through such a barrage of emotions it's hard to even be able to comprehend them. Some days I wonder how I am even still standing! Since I've been back I have searched and searched and tried to reconcile various components of who I was, who I am, and who I want to be all within the confines of understanding that at my core, there is you, Korea, and there always will be.

I cant step outside and take you in anytime I want to. I know practically nothing about you other than my body and my emotions yearn to once again touch your soil, breathe in your air, and be embraced by that which I consider to be my home home. Trying to figure out my place here when I constantly feel so displaced and trapped in that displacement is difficult. I try my best to do the things that remind me of you in ways that I know how - finding Korean community here, expanding on my research on identity intersections in Korean adoptees, eating and cooking Korean food, and never letting go of what it was like to be held within you for two weeks back in August when I felt truly at home. Yet, without actually being home home, I still feel such a gap - a gaping hole really.

It was on your soil I was born and it was to your soil I returned 32 years later, only to have to leave again. One day I will be back. I will come back to the land, the people, and the culture where I, for once in my life, felt whole and complete in all of my un-wholeness and incompleteness. I felt fully assembled in my disassembled ways. Parts of my life I have never been able to understand or even think about suddenly made sense in ways that I didn't and couldn't understand at the time, but in hindsight, what I do know is that my mind and my body knew where home home was. I knew where I was created and where I touched first. I constantly feel your pull and your presence in my life since returning to Minnesota, and it only grows stronger and stronger.

I had forgotten about you for so much of my life only because I never knew you. How could I remember something I never knew? But in not knowing you and in forgetting you, I never knew that part of who I was and have always been. Day after day, moment after moment, I continually forgot about my own self. Just as I was removed from Korea, Korea was also removed from me. I've spent the last couple of years slowly beginning to find my way back. I will spend the rest of my life continuing to find that confluence in me of the two rivers - the River Han in South Korea and the Mississippi River in Minnesota - and my life will never be separate from where it all began and what has always been a part of me.