I'm Mental and It's a Wild Ride

It’s a mentally wild ride I inhabit, this constant back-and-forth. I often feel like a Westerner through and through – I talk, think, and dream fluently in English. Yet, my internal wiring often defaults to an Eastern way of processing things. It’s almost like a split-personality syndrome, perhaps designed by the very act of immigrating across an ocean for what parents hope is a better opportunity. And honestly, I don't blame them for that decision. Had we stayed in Korea, I likely would've drowned in a soul-crushing amount of schoolwork and rarely seen the light of day. (I’ve heard the horror stories: school from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., then tutoring or self-study from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., with maybe 30 minutes for some late-night doomscrolling before crashing. That’s an absolute insanity I'm profoundly thankful to have sidestepped, all thanks to my mother wanting to steer us away from that over-studied lifestyle.)

My parents were young when they had my older brother and me, navigating their mid-20s and planning a future in an internet-less world. I'm 32 now and still haven't definitively chosen which career path I want to truly commit to, let alone thinking about having kids. These days, I have a harder time choosing the right Netflix show while my dinner gets cold than making major life decisions. It often takes over an hour of aimless scrolling before I inevitably land on The Office – my ultimate comfort show. Most of us millennials recognize that undercurrent of despair, don't we? Stuck between back-to-back "once in a lifetime" climate crises, ever-impending war escalations, multiple industries on the stock market exchange propped up on what Reddit aptly calls "hopium" (hope + opium), and the looming impossibility of ever owning our own land, let alone a home. We see the glass as decidedly less than half empty, though some optimists (and I commend them for it) insist it's more than half full. As a Korean-Canadian, I often oscillate between this optimistic pessimism, constantly trying to bridge the Western/Eastern divide within my own head.