nutshell

If you have ever lost, if you have ever felt lost, then you know.

You know that some things we learn only through experience. You know that some things we come to understand only after we have been swallowed up by them.

Some hopes become reality in ways that leave us still aching and still longing for something more.

It is not that I like being insatiable. It is not that I enjoy feeling as though I move through life like a black hole. My voraciousness leads me only into a constant state of desperate starvation—never satisfied, never fulfilled.

Never at peace.

Always groveling and grappling for something else—whether it be more or less—just something different. Something to take me away from where I am at that moment. Something to appease the nagging restlessness, the consuming void—that woman staring back at me.

* * *

I am exhausted. Undone.

I have forgotten myself.

This year has taken me with it and never brought me back.

* * *

I need a release. I need time to process all of this emotion. I feel emotionally stuffed. I cannot eat another bite.

And yet I feel hungry. I feel starved.

* * *

Exactly one year ago today on January 7, 2009, I got THE call. My biological mother and father had been found after seven years of searching for them.

This journey has been so much more than I expected and so many things that were unexpected. So much has transpired since then, while so much continues to unfold.

Life has been hectic and chaotic.

There are still days that I feel continuously on the verge of tears. There are others day that my mind goes numb and forgets all that has changed.

The new burden is one that I am more than willing to carry, and some may believe it is a lighter burden, an easier burden to bear. In some ways, it may be. But more so than being lighter or easier, it is simply different. In many ways, better, and in other ways, harder, and certainly more complicated.

* * *

The silence on my blog indeed has been an indication of my emotional stagnation, or perhaps more so my emotional procrastination, particularly in the face of a continuous onslaught of emotionally demanding circumstances.

As the year wore on, the backlog of unprocessed emotions and events seemed to force me into an almost necessary and involuntary hiatus from processing those very emotions and events. Life became so hectic and so fat with one event after another that there was neither time nor room to begin the process of sorting through it all.

* * *

Here is our year in a nutshell: [I know the formatting is haywire, but such is my life right now--I don't have the time to fix it]

January 7, 2009: Got THE CALL that my biological parents had been located & contacted

February 2009: Began fundraising efforts for a potential trip to Korea in June; received first correspondence from biological parents in the form of letters & photos

March 2009: Received a second set of letters & photos from biological parents

April 2009: Continued fundraising efforts to meet the first deadline for the fees for the trip to Korea

May 2009: Continued fundraising frenzy to meet the second deadline for the fees for the trip to Korea

June 2009: Finalized fees; traveled to Korea for 2 weeks with my husband; met each of my biological parents for the first time

July 2009: Upon returning from Korea, flew to visit my American parents

August 2009: Continued correspondence with biological parents in the form of letters

September 2009: Returned to Korea for two weeks for a second visit [but without Mike]; met more extended family while in Korea; upon returning to the States, made first contact with a biological cousin who also lives in the States

October 2009: Met my biological father's older brother (my Uncle) for the first time; flew out to visit my American parents for my Dad's 75th birthday

November 2009: Traveled to be with my husband’s Aunt in ICU after she

sustained serious head trauma in a car accident

December 2009: Mike & I got into a serious 3-car accident (car was totaled); that same day, we got a phone call that his Aunt had died; scrambling to deal with auto insurance & settlement & finding a new car in time for the holidays; traveled to visit Mike’s family for the holidays

January 2009: Traveling to meet for the first time more of my biological/Korean family

* * *

And quite honestly, that’s only the half of it. For the sake of privacy and out of consideration, there are plenty of other events & happenings that I have omitted.

I’m not trying to play the violin here—don’t take me as naïve, I realize that are a whole lot of other people who had and have a whole lot more going on.

This is just an explanation, only in part, of why I have been so silent and why I am moving so lethargically.

A fellow Korean adoptee recently contacted me concerned about my emotional state. I am concerned, too. But sometimes you must simply meet the demands of life regardless of what you’re feeling. I trust that reprieve and rest will come in due time.

For now, my husband and I are off to meet a few more members of my biological/Korean family for the first time. I would like to write more about it all, but as has been the case lately, I am out of time.

I anticipate eagerly the days when I will be able to return to my blog, and ultimately, enjoy a time of reflection and restoration.

For now, my husband and I trek on.

* * *

[Thank you for your concern, my friend. I really will be fine.]

a Memory or 3

Dried skate at the Busan Fish Market

A Variety of sea cuisine at Busan Fish Market

Rows of helmets at the DMZ in Korea, before entering the Third Tunnel.

Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea

눈뜨고코베인 - 싸이키댄스 (mv)

This Korean band is too much fun...

gain

I have not really written much yet about my second trip to Korea back in September.

I realize that I have been somewhat strangely silent about it.

* * *

In summary, I am glad I did it.

In all honesty, I would not do it again.

* * *

By this I primarily mean that I would not travel to Korea again without my husband, and I would not do things in the same way that I did the second trip.

It was just so much all at once without any of my normal supports.

I don’t know how other adoptees have done it. I feel like a weakling in comparison. I feel as though I am a different breed—one that would not necessarily survive according to the theory of “survival of the fittest,” if it did not allow for exceptions.

I am definitely an exception.

* * *

During the second trip to Korea, I learned some hard truths about each of my biological parents, and consequently, I had to face some not so pleasant truths about myself.

Yet, there were those moments that made me beam. When I got to meet my Uncle—my Korean mother’s younger brother—and his children for the first time, I could not stop smiling. My heart swelled with hope and joy. As we all gathered on the floor around the table for dinner, I felt as though I had found a home once lost but finally retrieved.

But as always, at least for me, it is a strange pendulum of gratitude and grief on which I swing. Each moment filled with joy seems not to pass without an equal amount of angst.

As I sat at the table observing this strange and dreamlike moment, my heart filled with comfort, while I equally felt an aching nostalgia for a life and a people I had never known. I felt envious of them. I felt pained that I would never know what might have been.

* * *

Rather, I must simply embrace what grace I now have to strive for something new and hopeful, albeit broken and uneven.

To quote Carl Sandburg, “One knows what one has lost, but not what one might gain.”

Certain things have diminished beyond recovery. Some things cannot help but remain irrevocably lost.

We cannot gain what never existed.

Yet I can gain those who have emerged, only that I may reach to grasp them and never again let the distance grow—so dark, so wide.

Joo Hyun: Seeking Birth Family

raw

Were wounds so old, ever so raw…

* * *

It would seem that one never quite recovers from that first loss.

We must endure a severance of that which was never intended to be severed.

So, almost as though we believe there is no other way, we spend the remainder of our lives dropping pieces of ourselves as we choose to leave or to be left—convinced that there is no hope of ever being whole again.

* * *

I see it over and over again among adoptees—a pattern of being left and leaving. It is as though we cannot but repeat that which was done to us.

We cannot live life without wounding ourselves and wounding those who surround us—time and time again.

It is as though the abandonment has become a part of our blood, our flesh so that it begins to trickle out into everything and everyone we touch.

* * *

Nothing seems able to satiate the persistent emptiness and loneliness, the ravenous depth of insecurity and uncertainty that tells me the world will always choose to leave me behind.

* * *

Body convulsing and mouth quivering, the words were choking in my throat.

Please, don’t ever leave me.

And how does one ever convince someone like me that he or she will not leave?

It is not his or her fault nor within his or her control that I am consumed by such a fear. And yet, how can a human being ever make such a promise without telling some form of a grey lie, wrapped in a thin veil of good intentions.

I know you’ll say that you will never leave me. And you would be the first to ever utter such a commitment, such a vow.

To this day, you have kept your word.

This makes me cry. This will always make me cry.

But these are the kind of tears that taste sweet, and those without which I hope I will never have to live.