over

I came here because I wanted to become a man. That's an embarrassing sentence to write, not just because it reeks of grandiloquence, but because it's true. At 25 years old I still felt very much like a kid, or at least not yet an adult, and it was due to my own shortcomings and shortsightedness. When the thought of teaching English in Korea took root in my brain, it mingled with this sense of inferiority and resulted in an acute paranoia that if I didn't do this thing I would regret it the rest of my life.

I didn't like it here from the start. About five minutes after I landed in South Korea for the first time, I seriously considered just getting on the next plane home. That thought would recur to me several times over the next 6 months or so. I didn't like my coworkers, I seemed ill-suited for the job, and I didn't have any friends. I did little outside of sleep and work. Sometimes I would go out drinking with some coworkers who annoyed me to no end but hey, there are only so many nights you can sit at home alone watching Arrested Development again. 

On weekends, with nothing better to do, I would take 8 hour walks, walking until I got lost and then trying to find my way back home. I remember staring at the calendar on my desk every day, thumbing through all the months until I got to December, when my contract was up and I could go home again. I would go to a website that had a date duration calendar, which would tell me exactly how many days I had to go. It all seemed impossible and interminable and I tortured myself with these things. 

Then, sometime around month 7 or 8 something good happened. I made friends. Three of them. They lived near me and every night after work we'd get dinner and drink some beers and play darts and it was heaven. Soon I started to think, "Hey, maybe I should come back."

I did come back, to a different city. I made different friends, and visited the old ones, and I started to get pretty good at the job. But looking back now, I was probably a bit out of control. I drank too much, went out too much, and didn't take care of myself, and I soon found myself in a hospital bed at death's door.

I don't know if it was my brush with the great blue yonder, or a side effect of the massive amounts of prednisone I was taking, but in the months after I had a bit of a personality change, the kind of maturity that comes with accumulating some bona fide life experiences. 

I went home and then I came back again. Three years seemed perfect to me. A beginning, middle, and end. But then something unexpected happened; I fell in love. So I came back, and this time I stayed, not just 1 year, but over 3 now. And during that time I got married and now we have a daughter. The possibility of spending the rest of my life here became very real. So it's time to shit or get off the pot, and I'm not sure which one I'm doing but it's the one that involves going home two weeks from today. 

I find myself going to bed with anxiety, like I did in the weeks before I first came here, though the cause of that anxiety is quite different now. I have a family to take care of now, and I don't really know how I'm going to go about doing that just yet. I hate to end this blog with some hackneyed "if there's one thing I've learned through all this, it's..." statement, but suffice to say I have faith things will sort themselves out.