Happy New Year!
Every year on January 1st, I receive a letter from my past self. Per the recommendation of Safi, I use a service called FutureMe that sends emails to your inbox in the future. This year’s letter naturally came from January 2022 Me—a version of me still waiting to hear back from job applications, still living in Athens, and coping with the ambiguity of transition.
In 2022 I moved to Chicago with my best friend in hopes of escaping the routine of my small hometown. After moving from Korea, I was eager to build new relationships in this new phase of life. While I was able to rekindle old friendships and foster new ones, I also worked three to four jobs at once and marinated in emotional isolation as I adjusted to WFH life in a new city. (We are NOT carrying this toxic productivity mindset into 2023!!)
These days, I carry the joy of knowing that past me would be proud of me now. The first time I went to Harajuku in 2015, I almost cried because I knew that a middle school version of myself would be proud of who I had become. After reading my FutureMe letter, I know that January 2022 Me would proud of January 2023 Me. Grad school has been a monumental privilege that I don’t take lightly. So far, studying in London has been an opportunity to reevaluate my relationship with labor, with my future, and with academia. Making friends in grad school has been a deliberate exercise in vulnerability and in using the educational space for radical self-inquiry. I’m genuinely really happy here!
I feel like I’m having another self-discovery era. Do you ever really stop learning new things about yourself? Readers over the age of 27, please let me know.
This year, my big goal is to reassess my internal standard for love and belonging. One of the integral prerequisites to stronger relationships that I need to deconstruct is my relationship with myself. Much of my pervading self-image was built in college from a place of fear and unkindness toward myself. That stuff is deeply ingrained now, but we have the rest of the year to work through it. 🙂
Other goals for the year: journal more, write more letters, and adopt a mentality of “if it’s not a ‘hell yeah,’ it’s a ‘hell no’” towards opportunities that come my way. (I already got to say no to an opportunity this week!)
Did you make any goals for the new year? Have any upcoming plans, hopes, or dreams? Books you’re excited about reading? 👀
Relevant passage from my recent read:
“Her voice always shook a little whenever she spoke from the heart. She told me once that she wanted to fix her weak habit of letting her speech betray her feelings. She was ashamed of the trembling in her voice when she became emotionally vulnerable, of her unsociable personality, of her tendency to walk slowly and eat slowly and read slowly, of her poor athletic skills, of her sensitivity that made her extract a hundred meanings from someone’s words or actions and chew over them endlessly. She had to overcome such weaknesses, she said, and become a new person. I didn’t know what she thought her own strengths were, but I loved the things she considered her weaknesses; they also made me smile a lot.”
— A Song From Afar, from Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eunyoung (translated by Sung Ryu)
On my mind lately:
- all these silly papers I have from the last term that are due at the start of term 2?? The British system continues to confound me, I’ve only gotten 1/3 of my marks back from my first assessments…
- being fully understood as a prerequisite for allowing oneself to be loved and how that is simply not my vibe
- Classes start next week, and I am excited about my modules called “Writing from the margins: Minority and ‘Outsider’ texts in Modern Japanese Literature” and “Gender in East Asian Literature” woohoooo
Only Naengmyeon 
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