Trauma series - Lesson
In this essay, I want to talk about one thing - the lesson that reshaped how I see life. One that I re-learned through traumatic experience. It’s what guided me a few steps closer to the man I’ve aspired to be.
You own 100% of your life — the best parts and the worst, equally.
It sounds simple. Most people have heard some version of it since childhood. So had I. But I had to relearn it the hard way, so let me walk you through that.
Crying in front of the mirror at 3 a.m., thousands of miles from home, wondering why everything happened, waiting in the 20-minute queue for the suicide hotline. I can tell you with confidence, that this was a shitty place to be. The last thing I wanted to do was wait more when I already felt miserable. But then it just struck me, that no matter how miserable it is, it is my misery. So I told myself: This is my life. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. And since it is, it’s my responsibility to live it.
Sure, ideally people don’t get kidnapped. You don’t lose your life savings overnight. And the suicide line shouldn’t have a queue. But I don’t live in an ideal world, and I still have to live through it.
When you accept that your life is 100% yours, you start owning it. Even when you don’t want to. You start taking real responsibility for the decisions you make, the things you do, and how you spend your time. You stop pretending someone else is in control.
Bad things happen to me. They will happen to you as well. Bad, unfair things happen to everyone, many times throughout all of our lives. And when bad things happen, you can either feel like shit and have a bad day, month, year, life, or you can own it. If you feel like shit, your life becomes shit. It becomes a sad, painful life. But if you own it, it becomes a problem to solve. And when you have many difficult problems to solve, you end up with a busy life. But a busy life is always better than a miserable one.
You can’t solve all the problems at once. Some problems take a long time to solve. Getting off that suicide line queue, I could sense that this problem is about to be a long and disgusting one. So I thought carefully about what I can change first, and where to start.
In many ways, going through trauma felt like debugging.
- I had to understand what was happening to my body, so I read books like The Body Keeps the Score.
- Then I got therapy and tried different antidepressants - none of them really worked.
- I improved to be functional enough, so I started gymming.
- ...
Our lives are a chain of decisions we make, each interacting with different systems of the world, and whatever those systems give back to us.
I don’t want to take away the romance of life by turning everything into a system. Life really is beautiful with its randomness. But we’re still bound by certain constraints at every step.
It comes down to three things:
- The decisions we make and the actions we take.
- The systems we belong to and interact with.
- Whatever those systems give back to us.
You have very little control over the second. You can guess at the third. But you can only control the first.
And to get there, you first have to accept your life for what it is.
I wish my life was just backend code, having gourmet coffee with the people I love, and the occasional Spanish girl telling me I have a pretty smile when I travel there. But it’s not.
Getting laid off from Twitter. Almost getting killed. Dealing with trauma. Realizing my Spanish isn’t good enough to say anything smooth back to her.
The best parts of my life belong to me, just as the worst parts do. But to make good choices, I need to look at my life directly, with a clear mind. For a long time - maybe my whole life - I did this without proper thinking. Only when I was pushed to the point where I’d lost control of myself did I finally start learning how.
Going back to that moment in front of the mirror, after waiting about fifteen minutes on hold, I hung up. I looked at myself and promised that I would start putting my life back together. That's not what I wanted to do, but that is what I was determined to.
My company had offered me a fully paid sixteen-week leave, and for fucks sake I wanted to take it. I wanted to fly back to Korea, spend time with my family, eat homemade food, and see my friends.
I wasn’t sure that if I went home, I’d ever come back to London. Maybe I’d become one of those has-beens who never quite make it abroad - open a bakery somewhere in Korea, get some kittens, and call it a day. I’m not saying that life is worse than mine - just different. But it’s not the life I aspired to.
When I got on that plane years ago to leave Korea, I knew sacrifice that came with it. The time I’d never spend with family and loved ones and the comfort of living as a non-immigrant. More importantly, all the time they had to give up because of this selfish choice I made. I don’t know exactly when I developed this, but I’ve always felt the responsibility to work hard and make it. How could I not? With all the luck, support, and opportunity I was granted.
Before Colombia, I had that responsibility. And after Colombia, I still did.
At rock bottom, I realised I couldn’t wait ten years, or next year, or even tomorrow. I have to do it today. Even if I was broken, even if I was scared, it was still my job. Not the job I wanted, not the one I signed up for, not a fair one, but the one I chose to live.
So I hung up. I wrote to HR, told them I was coming back next week, and opened my laptop to start writing code.
The first few weeks were tough. I’d catch glimpses of their faces at the edge of my vision on random London streets. I couldn’t focus for more than twenty minutes before I had to get up and walk. But somewhere inside me was this raw, stupid optimism that things would get better. And the optimism worked.
At some point, I started gymming again. Then I regained my ability to code. And then I started writing good code. Then I was fully recovered. And now, I’ve gone past recovery.
It was scary. I was so fucking tempted to blame everything - the people who did it, society, bad luck - and book the next flight home. But a thirteen-hour flight doesn’t make my life any less mine.
So I stayed. This was my job: to live my life, with trauma.
And there’s something almost beautiful about that process, facing what you want to run from, every single day. It’s its own unique color of romance. You learn to accept the parts of life you wish weren’t yours, and you start changing them. Because it’s your life.
One day, when I’m smarter and wiser, hopefully I’ll be able to teach this lesson to my kids without them having to go through what I did.
There are too many people who supported me through this journey to thank one by one. So I won’t list the names here, but I’ll try to reach out to each of you in my own time. But thank you, Peter, for being with me last year. The essay felt incomplete without mentioning you by name.
Every man has two lives, and the second begins when he realizes he has just one.
Confucius