(Almost) 10 Years Later

It’s January 19th, 2025.

Since January 1st, I’ve been sticking to one of my New Year’s resolutions: running. In the final hours of 2024, on a 15-hour flight back to Korea, I read Haruki Murakami’s ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,’ which gave me some good momentum to get started. Despite the snow and my aversion to the activity itself, I have stuck to my schedule so far. I’m hopeful that I can keep it up, but time will tell. While exercise almost always makes people’s list of New Year’s resolutions, there’s another one on my list that also requires consistency and endurance: writing.

It’s been almost 10 years since I started this blog in 2016. And it’s been almost 5 years since I left my teaching job in Korea during which time I wrote the majority of what exists on this site. Writing about that experience of moving to Korea, making a little life in Daejeon, figuring out my job, learning the language, and traveling, made the whole experience richer. It was fun to see that the posts were useful or interesting to others, but mostly it was for me. To be able to look back and remember how I felt, and what I did, and to use this site as a place to get my thoughts and feelings out of my head to process them. And it served that purpose very well! (Although looking back at some of them makes me cringe, I can’t deny that they were true to how I felt at the time.)

A lot has happened since then, both in my own life and in the world. My last post was on January 19th, 2020. Exactly 5 years ago to the day. On a whim (and out of an interest to write again) I logged back into this account the other day, and to my surprise, I discovered that this site has continued to receive traffic and that some comments had accumulated over the years that I hadn’t seen. Mostly from potential or future EPIK teachers who found the posts reassuring. And some from others who had just enjoyed poking around the site. It was lovely to see. And encouraging! If you left a comment in the last 5 years, thank you 🙂 Logging back in here felt familiar, although the interface has changed a bit, all of my unpublished drafts, the photos that I used, and email subscribers are all still there. It felt a bit like stepping back in time.

I logged back in because, in addition to exercise, I am hoping to add creative writing back into my life. At some point, I may write an update on what has been going on over the last 5 years, but suffice it to say that I have continued to write (a lot) but now it’s all academic. Writing this blog consistently for several years definitely helped my transition to graduate school and the sheer volume of writing that I was going to have to do. But throughout that transition, I had to train myself to write “academically.” To move away from the personal, casual tone that I could use here, and take myself out of the writing to more efficiently communicate my research. To write for the sake of clarity not feeling or entertainment.

Admittedly, that process sounds difficult and boring, but I have enjoyed it! I have loved the challenge of academic writing. I love that you have to choose your words carefully because each one counts. I love how after revisions and more revisions you slowly widdle away the fluff and find something solid inside. I love trying to find the logic and flow of an article. To me, it feels like sewing a quilt, bringing together different patterns and themes to make a coherent bigger picture. Like anything, academic writing is a lifelong endeavor. It uses different muscles than other kinds of writing, and although I am still learning, I am enjoying working out those muscles.

But I have missed this. Even in the few paragraphs that I have written here so far, I have missed hearing my own voice in my head as I write. I have missed writing in the cadence of how my thoughts and feelings sound to me. Not just how they should sound for an academic audience. As someone who is not a very good verbal communicator, this is one of the few ways that I can really express myself. When I don’t write things down, I end up just carrying them around; often crumpled, jumbled up, and unorganized in my mind.

So I want to start writing again. And taking pictures. I don’t know exactly what’s in store for the content here but as almost everything I do now is still driven by a love of language and culture it will likely be a mix of that.

Writing for any audience is a vulnerable thing. And starting this up again feels scary but in a good way. I think I could use a little push outside my comfort zone. I hope this can be a way to process things, to share my experiences in the way that I am best able to; through writing not speaking.

If you are still on the email list for this blog, this may be coming totally out of the blue. Please feel free to unsubscribe or stay subscribed as you feel comfortable.

Thanks for reading.

More soon 🙂