LALATOWN LIFE

The sofa felt as if it were swallowing me.

Or maybe I had simply become part of it.

My shoulders hurt. My neck hurt. I would lie there with my head turned in one direction, clicking the remote this way and that, knowing I was uncomfortable and still unable to make myself sit up.

Taking a shower every day felt difficult.

I brushed my teeth once a day.

Changing my earrings felt like work. Drying my hair properly felt like work. Mascara was too much work. Eyeliner was too much work. Even cleaning up my eyebrows felt like something that required energy I simply did not have.

Somehow, without realizing it, I had come very close to the point where depression and helplessness were beginning to swallow me whole.

And today, while hiking, I realized something.

I hadn’t even known how unhappy I was.

Or perhaps I knew.

I just couldn’t allow myself to say it.

I’m not happy.

Such a small sentence.

Looking back now, I wonder if that one sentence might have saved me years of fighting with myself.

But at the time, saying it felt dangerous. As if acknowledging my unhappiness would make everything collapse. As if all the years I had spent holding things together would suddenly dissolve in front of me.

So I kept holding on.

And in doing so, I think I slowly disappeared from myself.

This isn’t about blaming someone else for my unhappiness. And it certainly isn’t about turning around and saying, This was all my fault.

Neither one is what I need anymore.

I only need to be able to look at that woman on the sofa and say:

Yes.

You were unhappy.

You were exhausted.

You were depressed.

And you were trying very, very hard to survive a life you couldn’t yet admit was making you unhappy.

That is all.

A few days ago, memories from that time began coming back to me. Then, for completely unrelated reasons, I found myself going through old photographs—more than ten years of them.

And suddenly I saw something else.

There had been another life.

There were places I had gone, people I had met, things I had done. Experiences that had carried me through years when I didn’t even understand how badly I needed carrying.

Today I realized something that startled me:

Without those memories, those experiences, those little pieces of myself scattered across the years, I don’t know if I would have found my way out.

And then today, another funny thing happened.

I wondered whether I might apply to teach Korean.

There is a university near a place I have been thinking about moving to, so I thought, I wonder if they have a Korean program?

They did.

Then I discovered they had art programs too.

And somewhere in the middle of all this searching, a very obvious thought occurred to me:

Wait.

I’m Korean.

Of course I can teach Korean.

And then another memory appeared.

Wait.

Didn’t I once stand on stages in international settings, hosting events and interpreting in front of representatives from foreign embassies in Korea?

Oh my God.

I did.

I had forgotten.

Not the event itself, exactly.

I had forgotten the woman who could do it.

For such a long time, I had been made to feel like a woman who sat around the house doing nothing. Somewhere along the way, after years of hearing versions of that story, I had begun to forget what I had done, what I could do, and even what happiness had once looked like on me.

And perhaps this is what forgiveness has begun to mean to me.

Not pretending nothing happened.

Not blaming myself.

Not blaming someone else forever.

Just allowing myself to tell the truth.

I was unhappy.

I didn’t know how to say it.

And now I do.

A few months ago, I started wearing earrings again.

Not the same pair every day because changing them felt like too much trouble. I actually choose them now. I match them to my clothes.

I put on mascara.

I draw my eyeliner.

I dry my hair.

I buy clothes that feel like me again.

These are ridiculously small things.

Except they aren’t.

Because sometimes coming back to yourself doesn’t arrive with trumpets and a dramatic declaration.

Sometimes it looks like standing in front of a mirror and thinking,

Hmm. These earrings.

And putting them on.

Apparently, the Caretaker of LALATOWN had a life before LALATOWN.

I had simply forgotten her.

Well.

Welcome back.