(2023 – Rising from the Grave, 2024 – Getting the Monkey Off My Back)
I read to find stories that might soothe me, shape me, pull me outside of myself. I scroll and scribble, hunting for echoes of my own fractured narrative. I want to believe I’m crawling out of the grave I’ve been trapped in, clawing my way back toward something like living.
But therapy costs more than I can afford, and instead of healing, I find myself lashing out. I share my trauma like drive-by shootings—sharp, sudden, and terrifying—leaving friends and family stunned, then silent. They don’t know what to do with me. I don’t blame them.
Hospitalized again, I reconnect with high school friends, their voices bright, offering kindness wrapped in condescension. They think they’re helping. But they speak to me like I’ve never grown up. Unmarried. Childless. As if those facts alone explain my grief. They know nothing of living in a place that does not welcome them. A country that doesn’t understand their pronunciation, that hears my white face but doesn’t see me at all.
I go to nature. I walk. I take photos of garbage and flowers and post them to Instagram like sacred offerings. Joy in the minuscule—what I can still access, what hasn’t yet been taken. These images repeat year after year, and still I act like I’ve just discovered them.
Completing my doctorate became a strange kind of exorcism—a final ritual of suffering and reclamation.
I was admitted in 2012, thinking I’d return to Indiana for graduate school. But the courses were threadbare, disappointing. I was ready to quit when a new online program opened. Maybe, I thought, I can twist this into something livable. Maybe I can stay in Korea and finish this from here.
But nothing worked as promised.
The three years of coursework dragged into six. Institutional support evaporated. Professors vanished. Courses were canceled. I didn’t complete my quals until 2019. The weekend before, my back went out—twisting sideways at a café table, my watermelon juice flying, pain blooming. At the hospital, they told me it was soft tissue. Nothing “real.”
The night of my qualifying exam, the electricity cut out. My entire campus went dark. I finished the exam lit by the glow of my iPhone screen, my face a ghost on Zoom.
Then came the conferences, the proposal, the first failed study, the second attempt. My committee began to ghost me. Others in my cohort said my topic wasn’t robust enough. Outdated. Embarrassing. But it was their idea. They encouraged it. The betrayal sat unspoken, heavy as stone.
And then—COVID.
My writing stalled. My health collapsed. My arm rotted. My kidneys faltered. I was so malnourished I couldn’t walk; my body began devouring itself.
It wasn’t until fall of 2023 that I began to tread water. No new medical crises. I found Kuby, rewrote everything. New outline. New permissions. New hope. I got IRB approval. I wrote. I presented. I slogged. Chapter by chapter, word by word, I dragged myself through.
All while teaching. All while pretending I was still whole.
And just as I began to see the end, the systems began to forget me.
My name disappeared from IU’s registry. Chodae’s payroll system rejected my ID. The hospital wouldn’t release my records. The numbers that identified me no longer worked. I was almost erased—until someone, somewhere, remembered my face. My voice. A file with my signature. I was allowed to pass.
In the summer of 2024, I passed my defense. Doctor of Education.
But I felt nothing. Just numbness. Shock.
Twelve years had passed. My life, in the meantime, had evaporated.
My friends were gone. My reflection was foreign. My body, swollen and broken, bounced awkwardly down the stairs with a cane and a bad knee. I looked like someone else’s memory. Not mine.
I got the monkey off my back.
But what’s left of me now?
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