You've written it a few times... that you thought you would never end up coming back here... not sure if you've already written about it (I only started tumblr a year or so ago) but I was just wondering why that was the case?? Totally ok if you don't want to get into it though!! ^^
I don’t think I have, really - and I don’t mind at all ^^~
I think several things contributed to it, but I found that year the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do and I did not manage it well, which kind of added to my um… dissatisfaction(?) Part of it had to do with language school which is no easy ride & very boring and not exactly fulfilling not to mention feeling very excluded from my classmates who were all chinese. There were definitely a few times I remember even leaving the classroom to go and sob in a toilet or something because of thoughtless things people did and said - which I have never done in my life before. Another part has to do with being 19 and in a foreign country and although I had lived away from home before and I was with a group of friends, I was just not prepared for the number of ‘life experiences’ in store for me. (read: awareness of the male gaze) I could spend forever on this but culture shock. Not as a realisation that things are different and or I couldn’t understand them but as a psychological condition & severe depression that hits you around 3-4 months in. Some other members of my friendship group and I hit that low at around the same time and it was very difficult for any of us to recover from. (This sounds ridiculous but for some people, I think it seemed like a betrayal if you were enjoying yourself or feeling better - I definitely felt some kind of burden like this.)Also, I feel like… it’s very strange to not like Korea? I don’t know, but at the time I was using tumblr and reading other people’s blogs like… Seoul has a very glamorous and fun image and I just could not feel that at all. I even feel like there’s a kind of pressure (maybe even still in the blogging sphere??) to be like I love this city… I know and love this city more than you all the time. Sure, maybe you do. I could have done with someone saying to me, It’s fine, you don’t have to like it that much, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to sit in your room and ignore that the city’s outside though…. does that make any sense?
And as Korean was my major, I also felt some major doubt about my future and wondered if I was really doing the right thing. I chose Korean completely on a whim knowing literally nothing about the country. So I really started to wonder if there was a point in continuing. (but I did, and in the end it’s the fact that I enjoyed my academic work that encouraged me to just come back and give it a second chance)
None of these are particularly unique problems I think: they’re just what you get when you live abroad, when you make friends, when you’re just growing up in general, but they’re feelings which once I came back to the UK I just inherently associated with Korea. oop this turned out a bit long :/
