Bear with me, guys, as I’m trying very hard to get back into the practice of daily writing. The topics are going to seem a little all over the map for a while, but I hope there’s at least still something of interest in it for you all. I’m trying to figure out exactly where I want to head in the future, and for the moment, that’s going to mean doing two things repeatedly, whether I want to or not: Following my gut and just doing the damn thing.

I was in the kitchen a couple of weeks ago before work, wrapping the chicken caesar wrap I had made for lunch at the shop in aluminum foil, when I realized I was almost out of foil and needed to buy a new roll. A memory came flooding back to me then that made me laugh out loud. I’ve been thinking about that memory on and off since, and this little ditty is the result. Hope you enjoy.

Shortly after I started kindergarten, my family and I were sitting around the table in the dining room having dinner when the phone rang. My father got up and answered it. He looked, at first, confused, and then perturbed. “Well, we are in the middle of dinner right now, but I will have her call you back. Okay. Bye.”

My mother, being the only “her” in the household besides me, and the only adult in the household besides my father, naturally assumed the phone call was for her. When my father returned to the table, she asked who it was. “We need to talk. It wasn’t for you.” He then turned to me. “Who is Lee and why is he calling you?”

I sensed trouble, but wasn’t exactly sure what the cause of it was, so I proceeded with caution in my answering. Lee was my friend, and I couldn’t be sure why he was calling me, but probably to talk?

“You gave him our phone number?”

You know it’s trouble for sure when your parents start asking you questions you know they already know the answers to, but I took comfort in the fact that my mother seemed to be holding back laughter on the other side of the table.

“Yes? Was I not supposed to?”

“And Lee is a little boy.”

“Yes. He’s in my class.”

“And he’s your friend.”

“Yes…”

“You don’t have little boy friends and you don’t need to be giving boys your phone number.”

I was crushed by this. I had been having a difficult time adjusting to attending school. I had taken like a fish to water to the studying parts, but I was struggling socially. I felt like I had been faced with an overwhelming number of strangers and, as I was painfully shy, I couldn’t figure out how to break in. Everyone else seemed to just find their people, and I didn’t know how to do that. But Lee had come right up to me and made everything feel easy.

Eventually, I think probably thanks to conversations with my mother that happened out of my earshot, my father relented, and I was allowed to stay friends with Lee. We even ended up carpooling to school, since it turned out he lived just a few blocks over. Lee eventually moved away, and I made other friends, though I wasn’t as close to any of them as I was to Lee, until second grade rolled around and I met Zach.

It was at the end of the school day, and I was walking down the hallway to go meet my mother out front, when I dropped my 64-pack of crayons and they spilled all across the hallway floor. I was bent down on one knee gathering them up, and suddenly there was Zach, with his red hair and freckles, helping me. He followed me out to the front, talking nonstop the whole way, and before I left, he asked me what class I was in. I told him, and every day after that, when the final bell rang, there was Zach, waiting outside my classroom door to walk me to the car.

Eventually we worked out that he also lived only a couple of blocks away, and after that, he would meet me at my house after school. We would ride bikes and play with the other neighborhood kids. He started coming with us on Saturday childhood outings. And, yes, eventually I did give him my phone number. We were allowed to play in my room but, bizarrely to me, only with the door open. He talked — a lot — and this was comforting for me, because I didn’t know how to talk that much. He, much like Lee, helped to draw me out of my shell.

One evening, after Zach had stayed for dinner and then eventually gone home, my father suddenly announced, “That boy is here too much.” I felt a familiar sinking in my stomach.

Luckily for my father, the situation soon resolved itself. One day, while we were playing in my room after school, with the door open, Zach pointed to the window and shouted, “Oh, my God! Look at that!” I turned my head to look and he kissed me. I don’t remember exactly how I reacted. I think I just asked him why he had done that, and he shrugged. What I know for sure is that I moved past it as if it were some kind of bizarre momentary insanity and tried to forget all about it. But a few days later, when I was walking him to the end of the block on his way home, he asked if he could kiss me again. I said no. I only saw him a few more times after that.

Even my mother started to worry when third grade rolled around, and I immediately took up with yet another boy, Ryan. Ryan, who constantly got in trouble for talking during class, who was thrilled to wind up with a row of C’s on his report card. Who once, misunderstanding the point of a class recycling project, came to school with an entire unopened roll of tin foil, beaming with pride about his contribution.

Ryan was the first boy who didn’t pick me. I picked him, and even the teachers seemed to be worried about this association. They spoke to my mother on parents’ days about how concerning it was that I, as a straight-A student who never got in trouble, seemed to be clinging so completely to a … questionable student, such as Ryan. And on top of everything else, of course, he was a boy. And I seemed to be making no effort to make any friends with the girls in the class. I wasn’t making any efforts to make friends with the other boys in the class, either, but that didn’t seem worth mentioning.

There was little my parents could do about Ryan, however, as he didn’t live in our neighborhood, so my time with him was limited to school hours and therefore outside of their jurisdiction. They were somewhat dismayed to find that the following year, in fourth grade, we were yet again placed in the same class. The teachers tried to do their part by not allowing us to sit together. But we still found our way to each other during lunchtime and recess and during any partner activities or group projects.

By this point, the situation had become serious. I had begun to fight back against my mother’s attempts to braid and curl my hair, wearing it instead in a simple ponytail. I was refusing to wear dresses, or anything pink or purple, opting instead for sportswear, which was more conducive to the soccer matches Ryan and I would play together during recess. My parents’ concern shifted from worry over the potential promiscuity of their elementary-aged daughter to something far worse. What if I wasn’t befriending all of these boys because I liked them like that? What if I was befriending them because I didn’t like boys like that at all?

I don’t remember this being articulated to me, exactly, but I picked up on it all the same. Even at that young age, I caught a whiff of hypocrisy in the way that they didn’t want me to attract boys’ attention, but wanted me in some way, it seemed, to want to be attractive to it. I would sit through lecture after lecture about not wanting to look “nice”, meanwhile my brother was off to school in more or less exactly the same clothes I wanted to wear with nary an eyelash batted.

I made straight As. I was placed in the advanced program at school. I never turned in an assignment late. I was never in trouble with my teachers. Wasn’t this enough? What could I possibly be doing to cause so much distress? I wasn’t allowing Ryan to “take me down with him”, as the teachers had expressed concern about. I couldn’t understand what all this fuss was about boys and girls and clothes and hair and phone numbers and open bedroom doors.

The irony of it all was that Ryan was the first boy that I had picked instead of letting him pick me. I still didn’t want to be kissed, not even by him, but I wanted to be near him all the time. I admired the way he could get scolded by the teacher — something that would have absolutely devastated me — and just shrug his shoulders and smile. How, when the whole class laughed at him for bringing in a brand new roll of tin foil for the recycling project, after the teacher explained to him that the point of recycling was to gather used materials, he simply turned to the room full of students, broke into a wide grin and took a bow, genuinely pleased to have entertained them, even at his own expense.

I liked that a boy like him should have wanted to spend all his time with other boys, but he figured I was just as good as any one of them, if not better. That he stood up for me when other boys didn’t want to play soccer with a girl, telling them that I was probably a better player than all of them combined, and they were probably just afraid I would beat them. That all the other girls in the class — both years — tried to get close to him, but I was the only one who succeeded.

I loved him in a way that was brand new to me. In a way that would have set my parents’ minds at ease on the one hand, and caused them to panic all over again on the other. There was no winning.

Ryan was important to me for other reasons, too. My third grade year, something had begun to go wrong at home. I couldn’t understand all of it, but I know that my mother came flying out of the back bedroom after a screaming fight with my father one Sunday afternoon and shouted at us kids to follow her out of the house. My father came shuffling after her, telling her to stop overreacting.

We walked around the block to a neighbor’s house with my father driving alongside us in the car, shouting at my mother to get in and stop embarrassing him and causing a scene. Tears were streaming down my mother’s face, and she was furious. Inside the neighbor’s house, we were sent to a bedroom in the back while our mother made phone calls in the kitchen.

Shortly thereafter, it was announced that my mother would be getting a job and attending night classes at a community college. That I, as the only other female in the house, would be taking over most of the household duties.

After the teacher spoke to my mother about Ryan, and after a few strange and vivid nightmares, I was deposited onto a counselor’s sofa for a few weeks in a row. Apparently, there was concern that the trouble at home was causing me to act out. I didn’t know how to explain that whatever was going on at home made my time with Ryan sweeter, and my time with Ryan was helping me to realize that I didn’t like being a girl in the way that my parents wanted me to — that the chores at home were helping me to realize that I didn’t want to be a girl in the way that my parents wanted me to — but that I would have chosen Ryan regardless. And the clothes, as well.

Ryan, it was explained to my mother, was troubled in part because he was the product of a single parent household. My parents were going to work it out. None of this felt right to me. There was nothing wrong with Ryan, and there was nothing wrong with me. Ryan knew that there was nothing wrong with me, and I knew that there was nothing wrong with him.

The next year, in the fifth grade, I would move up to intermediate school, and because Ryan and I didn’t live near enough to each other, we would end up being, finally, separated, as he graduated into a different school closer to his neighborhood. That year was profoundly lonely for me, not only because I had lost my best friend, but because the trouble at home had only gotten worse, and my girl body had begun to betray me in ways that I couldn’t have even imagined.

There was the training bra that was — humiliatingly — covered in tiny pink flowers. There was the last pool party of the summer that was ruined by the arrival of this truly ghastly, inhumane nightmare called a period, which I was taught at church was part of my punishment for Eve talking Adam into eating the apple. There was my mother telling me that, suddenly, the hair that grew naturally all over my legs was unsightly and unacceptable, and telling me that every week from then on, I’d have to spend up to an hour in the bathroom struggling to remove every speck of it.

There was the Saturday morning when my father walked out of the bedroom to find me in the hallway in my pajamas, walked back in and spoke to my mother in hushed tones, who then came out to tell me that I needed to get fully dressed from now on before I left my bedroom in the mornings.

I began to realize that the world was going to conspire to make me a girl in that way, whether I liked it or not. That there were, after all, some things that were very wrong with me, not because of any choices I had made, but just because I was born into this body. I needed to hide so much about myself to be fit for the outside world. I was dirty, unsightly, inappropriate by nature. And I didn’t have a say in any of this.

And then there were the contradictions. Liking boys too much was a problem, as was not liking them enough. Showing too much of my body was a problem, but drowning it in athletic clothing and sweats was an even bigger one. Not caring about how I looked told the world I was an undisciplined slob, but caring too much would mean I was shallow and vain.

It was like my body, which up until that point had been nothing more than a tool for experiencing and moving me through the world, had become the sum total of me. And everything about it was wrong. And there was no clear answer on how to fix it.

I missed Ryan profoundly, not only for who he had been to me, but also for how he had seen me. He hadn’t cared one way or the other that I was a girl, and he hadn’t stood for anyone else caring either. He hadn’t thought the ways that I was a girl were wrong, or that being a girl made me any different from the boys. He knew that I was a girl, existed in a girl’s body, but above and beyond that, he knew that I was me, the person who lived inside that body, and that the body was merely coincidental. And I realized, finally, how rare an experience that would be. I think, in some ways, I’ve been chasing it ever since.

When I was in college, in a small writing program at a an art school in New York, it was around sophomore year that we were sitting in studio and one of my professors said something that would stick with me through the rest of my time there, when thinking about my purpose when it comes to writing, and which continues to resonate with me now. My memory of the actual conversation—including which professor said it—is hazy now, but I believe it was something that a mentor of the professor’s had passed down to them, which had stuck with them as well. The professor said that instead of trying to find your voice as a writer, you should try instead to find your question. That most good writers spent the majority of their writing lives trying to answer a singular question, and that once you found your question, your writing would have new direction. 

My question has never been entirely clear to me, which I think has to do with the nature of the question itself. To be most honest, my question can’t be absolutely precise. It has something to do with what we can’t articulate fully—the spaces between people, between language and meaning, the gaps we can never quite close and what falls into them. To state my question with absolute clarity would be to lie about what the question is. But for me, that’s enough of an answer. It’s not a full, clear answer, but it’s the most honest one. 

Two years later, while sitting in a one-on-one meeting with another professor, going over my thesis, he looked up from the work we were going over that day after a long pause and said, “You don’t trust absolutes. You don’t like them.” I didn’t respond right away. That exact thought had never occurred to me before, so I took a moment to think it over. No, I said, I guess I don’t. They’re not honest. 

When writing poetry, you can get away with not confronting absolutes. You’re not bound by the same rules of other kinds of writing, and that allows you to wedge yourself into the gaps between things, to break language so that you can play in the grey areas. That’s why I like it so much. Poetry is the language behind the language we speak in everyday life, when clarity and efficiency are the priorities. Poetry is speaking in tongues. It’s open for interpretation. It leaves room for gut feelings and hunches, which we all apply to communication all of the time anyway, but often don’t want to admit to, and that, to me, makes it more honest. 

That makes the things I want—that I need—to write about now hard for me. I want to tell the truth, always, but the first thing I know about the truth is that it is never absolute. Objectivity is a lie, and the biggest liars you will ever meet are the ones who insist they are being objective, because they are lying even to themselves. 

Even facts are subjective, and believing they are not is the easiest way to be manipulated by them. If I tell you, for example, that you are 90 times more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash, that looks pretty bad for cars. You would be pretty sure that planes are safer than cars, based on that indisputable fact. Unless I follow it up by saying that you have a less than 1 percent chance of dying in a car accident. Unless I clarify that you probably spend far more of your time in a car than in a plane, so of course it’s more likely that you would die in one. It’s still a fact, but how it is presented matters. How it is interpreted can vary. Are planes really safer than cars? Or are cars only more likely to kill us because of circumstances that have nothing to do with their safety, like frequency of use?

Parsing through issues like how to present information is one of the biggest jobs a writer has, and one of the biggest responsibilities, especially in the world we find ourselves in today. But what I have to talk about now, going forward, can’t be objective, even slightly. To try to claim that it is—any of it—would be the biggest lie I could tell you. I can’t give you the absolute truth. I don’t have it to give. I can only offer you my truth, and the respect that comes with this lengthy and possibly overly philosophical disclaimer. 

I’ve reached a point where I feel like I can no longer discuss my present without explaining my recent past. I am tired of feeling stuck, unable to speak, because I want to protect others, even when they have shown no such instinct toward me. Of feeling bound up by ultimately pointless ethics related to trying to be objective, to include everyone’s perspective. I don’t want to expose anyone. I don’t want to insist that my side of the story is the true one. But I want to tell the truth about what has happened to me, from my point of view. 

So keeping in mind what I’ve already said about facts in the previous paragraphs, here are some facts:

Fact: I won’t be returning to the US with my husband. He will be staying in Korea, and we will be divorcing. 

Fact: We have been functionally separated since the beginning of 2017. He moved out for about two years, but circumstances that I will explain in detail at some point resulted in us moving back in together near the end of 2018. We still live together today, but we are not together and have not been since 2017. 

His perspective about that is different, and varies from day to day. Some days, we are still together and never stopped being together. Other days, we got back together at the end of 2018, but he understands we are not together now. It basically depends on what point he is trying to make at any given time. Regardless, since you need two people to consent to be in a relationship, and I have not consented to being in a relationship with him since early 2017, I can still state it as a fact that we have not been together since then. Since we have continued to live together, however, and communicate, some of the events I am about to discuss happened post 2017, in the period when we were no longer officially together.

Fact: He cheated on multiple occasions with sex workers, threatened to kill me on multiple occasions, going so far as to come at me with a knife on at least three, kicked in a locked door to get to me, has thrown countless objects at me including most devastatingly my laptop, has pulled his fist back to threaten to hit me too many times to count but only actually followed through once. 

Fact: I believe the only reason he didn’t hit me more was because I stood my ground. I explained to him in no uncertain terms that it was not going to be a beating, that it was going to be a fight, and I believe that he backed down only because he wasn’t sure he could best me if I fought back.

Fact: He has physically prevented me from leaving the house on multiple occasions, for hours on end, when I attempted to leave to get away from him during or after one of these episodes. Pure exhaustion often won out in the end, and after falling asleep and waking up the next morning, after the adrenaline and fear of the immediate situation had passed, I would lose sight of the urgency I had felt the night before to escape the situation. I would start to worry more about the practicalities–where I would live, what would happen to the animals, what would happen if I lost my visa and my right to live and work in Korea.This became a favored and effective tactic for keeping me in place.

Fact: I have said many, many, many things to him that overall I am not proud of, but am also not entirely sure I regret or didn’t mean. I have knocked things onto the floor, but never thrown them at him. I initiated physical contact once, to grab his shirt collar and pull him close to speak in his face. 

Fact: We have reached a kind of amicable stasis at the present, and I do not believe I am in danger. We live under the same roof. We speak to each other on a daily basis. We still often eat dinner together. 

While this may be hard to understand, given the common perception about abusers and the recipients of their abuse, that one is all bad and the other is all good, I don’t feel that our specific circumstances can be simplified quite to that degree. I believe, in fact, that the perception that abusers are monsters and not people is one of the most dangerous narratives people can put forward in an abuse situation. It is the humanness of abusers, and the understanding that they are not monsters, that often keeps victims hanging on to hope. Your abuser doesn’t have to be all or even mostly bad for you to be in danger. They can be humans who are fallible, injured, struggling with their own issues and trying to be better, and you can still need to get out of the situation. 

Fact: He was wrong. Fact: What he did was bad. I did not deserve any of it. Fact: I will spend years trying to recover from what he put me through. I don’t know if I ever will. Fact: We cannot stay married. 

If you were to ask Busan for his truth, I’m not entirely sure what he would say, but in the past, he has claimed many times that the thing that “makes” him behave in these ways is my strength. I’m too strong, too independent, too opinionated, too self-assured. No man, he has told me many times, can live with a tiger in his house.

My truth is different. My version of events is that Busan has always been happiest with me when I am at my strongest. When I am self-assured, on top of my game, confident,  independent, and taking no shit, he showers me with adoration. His love for me shines in his eyes. 

It’s the weakness in me he seems to have an issue with. When I need him, when I rely on him, when I am exhausted, vulnerable and most in need of love and support from him, that is when the monster inside the man begins to emerge. 

I am not that now. I have worked myself nearly to death over the past several years to rebuild myself and get back to a position of strength. I don’t need him now–not for anything, and I can walk out the door and board a flight back to the US at any point and be just fine without him. And he knows it. And so, for now, I am safe. 

But I have been here before and been fool enough to think that it was him who changed, and not me. He hasn’t changed, and he won’t. Which is why I have to go. Even though, now, we can sit and have dinner together. Even though we can chat throughout the day like friends. Even though, at this particular moment, I do not believe I am in any danger.  The next time I’m weak, the next time life overwhelms me and I need support from the people I love, it will all come roaring back. I know that. And that’s not a way to live.

I think looking all of that over, it will become clear to many of you who have been wondering why I’ve been so quiet, so cagey, so vague, and so distant over the past few years that I had my reasons, one of them being that I didn’t even know where to start. One of the tactics that abusers deploy to great effect to control their targets is chaos and confusion. They create pandemonium, gaslight so effectively and shift skins so quickly that it can take ages to even get your bearings about you to begin to sort out what is what. 

It’s confusing for people on the outside, to whom everything seems so clear cut and simple, how the target can be so confused and conflicted. I knew that simply saying publicly in real time, “Busan hit me,” or “Busan cheated on me,” or “Busan threatened to kill me and came at me with a knife” would only lead to a cacophony of outside voices that would add even more to the chaos.

One of the biggest things that is taken away from you in an abusive, manipulative situation is your ability to trust yourself. I have clung to that ability my entire life. I was born into a gaslighting culture, with a gaslighting religion and the king of all gaslighters as a father. I had to learn how to trust myself to survive. I’ve had to learn, also, to moderate that part of my personality–needing to be full sure that I’m right about things, and being hypersensitive to the possibility that other parties aren’t having an honest discussion, but instead trying to manipulate the facts. 

But part of trusting yourself is knowing your limits, and knowing that, in particular, your perspective is limited. Knowing that other people can tell the truth with their whole chest, and it can be completely different from your truth, but still a version of the truth. If you want to have healthy relationships with other people, you have to learn how to balance your truth with theirs, and also spot when the two are just never going to overlap enough to make things work.

In a good faith situation, you have to be able to hear and consider both truths, and admit to yourself that both are probably a little right and a little wrong. You have to learn how to admit that you can’t possibly be right about everything, and sometimes you have to compromise. But when you’re in an abusive situation, that ability can very easily be used against you.You can’t give someone the benefit of the doubt when all they are looking for is a chink in the armor. And when someone learns that being too stubborn or too insistent on your own truth is something about yourself that you worry about, that it’s something you carefully monitor with yourself and know to be a weakness, it can become their greatest weapon. It can become your achilles heel.

My version of the truth is that he yelled at me for no reason. His version of the truth is that I did something frustrating that caused him to yell. I can take that on board. Sometimes people do things that contribute to other people losing their cool. People get frustrated. People yell. I can try not to do the frustrating thing anymore, if he can try not to yell. After all, a healthy relationship is about compromise, right? It’s about learning not to always insist that you are right and the other person is wrong, but trying to see your own fault in the situation and take responsibility for it. Right? 

And then, some months down the line, I’ve become so frustrating that I’m causing plates of food to be thrown. And then eventually I’m causing doors to be kicked in. I’m causing my husband to cheat. I’m causing him to pull out a knife and threaten to kill me or harm himself. I’m causing all kinds of things. Some of the frustrating things I do to cause these things include expecting him to wash the dishes after I cooked dinner, not scrubbing the floor the way his mother does, being hurt when he doesn’t do anything for my birthday, getting up to leave the table during a meal when he is berating me, and “bringing down the mood” by being sad while my mother was dying. 

But my truth isn’t the only one, right? And when I do take a stand and say, no, sometimes things are just 100% wrong? Well, that’s just me and how I always need to be right about everything, don’t I? I can never accept any of my own responsibility in the situation, can I? I’m little miss perfect, little miss never wrong.

It doesn’t take these kinds of people long to figure out where your buttons are. Your sore spots. It didn’t take him long to realize that when he said, “You know, you’re not always right about everything,” I would automatically take a step back. That if he applied a little pressure in just that place, I would stop and question myself.

How do you assert your truth after that? How do you even know what it is anymore?

Looking at all of that written out there at once, it looks stupid. I feel stupid. But that’s the thing about the truth. If you show this to enough people–and it won’t even have to be very many–eventually one of them will say something about how I probably caused some, if not all, of this. If not by pushing him to it, then at least by staying. You may have even had some thoughts about that yourself while reading. I live in this society, too. I’m not immune from those thoughts or messages.

But acknowledging that the truth is subjective is not the same as saying that there is no such thing as truth. And sometimes the best you can do is shut out all of the noise and figure out, at the very least, what your truth is. I needed to sort things out for myself, with the help of a handful of very trusted loved ones. I needed to block everything out and go deep inside to the stillest part of myself, cup my hand to my ear and listen for the whisper of inner truth. I found her. I stayed down there with her for a long time, resting and listening. She told me many things. And I’m back now, with all of the things that she taught me. I may not know what the absolute truth is, but I know what my truth is, and I’m learning more about it every day. And I’m ready to start talking about it.

Y’all ever have a week that feels like it might be a test from the universe, and if so, that you’re probably not passing it? I’m not talking about anything major, but just one of those weeks that’s like death by a million paper cuts. 

That’s alright, though. We all have them. We all get through them. And let me tell you… when a big part of your job is customer service? Well. Enough said. 

It’s not my ‘weekend’ yet… that starts on Monday for me. But I know it’s the weekend for most of you all, so I thought I’d post this little pick-me-up of a simple recipe in case you’ve had a week like I have and need something good, but not too complicated, to brighten up your weekend. For the shop this weekend, I’m making these chai-tea inspired, creme-brûlée inspired mini pies, a bit of an adaptation from a recipe I dug out of a cookbook I have. To make it, I needed to infuse some heavy cream with a bunch of spices to give it chai vibes, and while I was test-tasting, I realized it would make a killer coffee creamer. And it took about five minutes of actual work. 

I realize there’s already a chai-flavored hot beverage option that’s been around for a while, but I’m a coffee drinker, and tea is for when I’m already having a good day and feeling uppity, alright? When it’s been a week, we don’t hold back. We break out the coffee. Am I wrong? 

As a side note, I also fully intend to try this as a replacement for whipped cream and fully encourage y’all to whip some up to top off your coffees if you’re feeling fancy. I know I’m going to. 

We can’t always control how our days go, but we can damn well set aside 15 minutes for a nice cup of coffee.

My family thinks I’m fucking crazy. The words they use to my face, because they love me, are “brave” and “ballsy”, but I know full well the conversations they’re having behind my back probably sound a little more like how I talk to myself. Every few years, I approach them with another little bundle of chaos in the form of my latest scheme and then sit back and watch as they purse their lips, raise their eyebrows slightly, shake their heads, and say something to the effect of, “Well, if that’s what you think you should do….”

It isn’t. It’s never what I think I should do. It’s always something I know, logically, I should absolutely not do. But sometimes I just want the things that I want, even when it seems like I’m not really supposed to have them. And like a dog trained to bad habits by too many feedings from the dinner table, things have worked out for me enough times that I haven’t learned to act better. 

I mentioned on an Instagram post yesterday that I think I’m about to bid on a house. A house that’s in the States. Via the internet. From Korea. And what’s worse is that, given the current exchange rate and the 16 percent extra fees, I can only barely manage to scrape together an offer 10k over the starting bid, which is way too low for what’s on offer. There is basically no point in me doing this. Worst case scenario, I just wasted a lot of time and a little bit of money making a pointless bid on a house that was a dream drifting on the wind to begin with. Best case scenario, I just spent all my savings to buy a house over the internet. A house I’ve never seen in a state I’ve never visited.

You don’t have to tell me. I already know. I’m 37 years old and not particularly stupid. Despite all appearances, there is a lot of thought and weighing of pros and cons that goes into my harebrained schemes. I don’t take the long shots because I think I’m likely to make them. I take them because I can’t stand the thought of a life without them. Because I don’t know what I would do with a life that was only made up of what seems obviously possible. I’m fully aware that I only get one go-round, here. But that thought doesn’t make me want to be more careful. It makes me terrified of letting fear and circumstance hem me in. It makes me want to take every chance I get to grab fistfuls of life with both hands and not let go.

Let’s be clear: forgoing an act of God, I’m not gonna get this house. I’m still not even sure I’m gonna go through the absolute circus it would take to get a bid in from another country. I’m still waiting for my gut to settle on the issue one way or another. I’ve got a little over a week before I have to decide. But at this point, it’s not really about this house anymore. I’ve been poring over real estate listings for close to two years now, but it has all just felt so murky and hypothetical. Up until this point, it was mostly a feverish self-soothing activity to prove to myself, on the evenings when I was really starting to panic, that at the very least I could manage to get a roof over my head, even if that roof didn’t also include indoor plumbing. But this week, something shifted, and I started to see the outlines of a life — a life after Korea, after everything that has happened here. 

Working in the bakery, I’ve met a lot of folks who have a foot in both worlds, just like me. Whether they were Korean and had lived in the States or were from the States and were living here, the fact that I run one of the few American-style bakeries in the city drew them into my orbit. I’ve had a lot of chats over the past few years with people who were, like me now, preparing to make a transition from one side to the other or trying, at least, to make up their minds about whether or not they should. My advice has always been that the best way to do it, if you can, is to wait until you feel like you’re running toward something instead of away from something. 

I’ve got a lot back home that I’m running toward, but to be perfectly honest, until recently, this whole shenanigan has definitely felt more like an escape plot. All of the specific reasons for that will, I’m sure, become clear to you all in time. For now, I just have to focus on getting out first. But with this house and all of the potential I saw for a life there, the balance has shifted somewhat, and this week, I don’t feel so much like an escapee. I feel more like a person who is starting something new. And I think, ultimately, that’s what the long shot gives you: a sliver of hope that you can have more than you should really dare to ask for, and the chance to see possibilities instead of probabilities. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need. 

Here. Have a recipe for raspberry chocolate cake. 

Y’all, what a year. I always feel like I have so much explaining to do when I pop back up on this blog once or twice a year, but I have nothing to really say for myself this time, except that in late February of last year, a big-time Korean Instagrammer stopped by my humble little shop, and very quietly and inconspicuously proceeded to blow up my bakery business. In a good way. By March, business had doubled, and by July, it had quadrupled. It was a rollercoaster ride of a year, and I spent pretty much the whole rest of 2021 just trying to hang on for dear life and keep up with the onslaught of orders and walk-in business that was coming my way. I had very little time for anything else, especially faffing about with photos for fun, and the last thing I wanted to do in my (increasingly limited) free time was bake something.

Business is still good, but with the help of a new, much larger oven, and a baptism-by-fire crash course in baking time management, things feel a lot more stable now. And after a year of feeling mostly like a cupcake-making robot, I feel quite itchy to get my hands dirty with some non work-related baking projects. That having been said, sometimes baking is still the last thing I want to do on my days off, so I feel like it’s necessary to warn you that the focus of this blog will probably be shifting a bit over the coming year. There are other reasons for the shift, which I think I will share more about as time goes on, but suffice it to say that this will hopefully be a very important year for me in terms of thinking about my future and what I want to do going forward.

Keeping a baking blog is harder than I thought it would be. I, for one, would rather die than write 1,000ish words of baking instructions, more or less the same, every single time I post a recipe. I think most bakers have the general ideas down already if they’re looking for recipes, and there’s not much about the ratio of baking powder to baking soda in a recipe, to name just one example, that I can explain better than literally anyone else on the internet. It’s just not the kind of shit I like to write (or read, for that matter). I have a lot of love for food as a part of culture, and ingredients, and the way that I think food represents a very important part of our humanity. But it feels increasingly difficult to sit down and find a way to somehow tie a recipe for orange chocolate cake, for example, to something that’s currently going on in my life or some bigger, overarching theme. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying. But at the stage I’m at in life, currently, and considering the urge I have to move back toward a certain type of writing, I just feel like I need more wiggle room. Thrashing room? We will see.

I don’t really know what’s coming. That’s probably the thing I’m working the hardest on at the moment, in my personal life, is being okay with the unknown and accepting the fact that this year is going to largely be about flying by the seat of my pants and feeling my way through the dark, while trying to keep a sense of wonder and curiosity at the forefront, as opposed to fear.

I am making at least some few small attempts to keep the chaos in check, however, and have set up a few different situations to aid in that. I think this blog will be kept mostly for making — making cakes, making recipes, making other things with my hands, as well as some personal updates. But I also want to get back into more theoretical/cultural writing, especially on topics related to women, gender and feminism, and for that type of shit, you should come find me on Medium. I’ll be posting short-form updates about anything I’m posting anywhere, as well as probably more frequent, less important general goings-on on Instagram. And if you’re interested in a general mishmash of all of my long-form nonsense, you can sign up for my email list at Substack, where I think I will just go ahead and make a chaotic mess of everything, because technically, you’re asking for it.

Now that I’ve sufficiently buried the lead with several paragraphs, I’ll go ahead and at least say this: barring some god-forbidden, unforeseen disaster, this will probably be my last year in Korea. After 14 and a half years, in early 2023, I plan to move home.

So about that orange chocolate cake….