I came to an important realization last night after reading through a bunch of my old Facebook notes (Remember when that was a thing? Ah, the good ol' days...): I've been worrying WAY TOO MUCH.
Okay, so I'm pretty sure I can feel my brother rolling his eyes at me from halfway around the world ("You? Worry?? NEVER."), and I don't want him to hurt himself, so let me explain:
I arrived in Korea in February of this year to start my placement as an EPIK (English Programs in Korea) teacher. After my orientation and the necessary "settling in time", I decided to start a blog, partially to document and share my life in Korea, and partially because I've always wanted to give it a shot. And thus this blog account was born!
...but that was about 2.5 months ago, and this is my first post, which brings me back to the worrying.
You see, my first few months here have been kind of rough on me, for a variety of reasons: culture shock, the stress and excitement of meeting my Korean family for the first time as an adult, trying to figure out what's going on in my school... ever, classes and students and teachers... the list goes on. The upshot is that I was pretty stressed out and a bit down on myself, and I worried that if I tried writing anything, it would end up being really depressing and no one would want to read it. I worried about being seen as a failure, or that people would think I couldn't handle it here. So, I kept putting it off.
But while I was reading my old Facebook notes, I realized that most of what I wrote was written during times of stress, trouble or confusion, and in writing about those situations, I was able to extract some meaning from them. I also got some extremely interesting responses from friends who had similar thoughts and experiences, and that's what really got me interested in this whole bloggy business: the idea of sharing experiences with people, of learning about them by revealing something about me.
And just like that, Facebook motivated me to finally write a blog post. Didn't see that one coming.
I also stumbled across a comment from a friend, who said, "If you want to write, then write. It's not your job to impress or
entertain everyone who reads it; just write what you want to write." It's like he was reading my mind AND my future.
Well, it's only been several years since that bit of advice, but I'm going to take it (better late than never, right?). Let's do this thing.
**P.S. Don't worry, not every post is going to be quite so rambly and strange (probably). I just really wanted to start this thing, and had no idea what an "appropriate" first blog post looks like, so this is what I ended up with.**
