Enough was enough

You can be told a million times that nothing will change until you change your attitude and start believing in yourself. It’s wonderful and true advice, but when you’re in the middle of something awful…it’s hard advice to take. You want the opposite to happen – for your situation to change so you can have a better attitude as a result. That might happen to some extent, but a change in circumstance without an initial change in attitude won’t allow for as much happiness or appreciation.

I say all of this because I have been living this way. I got back from Korea almost six months ago after being there for almost a year and a half. Getting back meant feeling like I went back in time. I had changed and grown so much …but everything here was the same. I began to slip back into my old ways.

Prior to moving to Korea, I was stuck. I went to school, went home, wrote, talked to my family, and that was pretty much it. I was terribly shy. I was also unwilling to get to know anyone and make close friends other than ones I had from high school. I knew I had to change something. I decided to go to Korea. I changed.

I made amazing friends who were as dear to me as family. I had a boyfriend for whom I cared so deeply. I became this vibrant, outgoing, caring person that I didn’t know I could be. I am sure my family knew that about me but few other people did. I put up major walls.

Then I came home.

I was alone. My friends were so far away. My boyfriend and I broke up. I was depressed. I found myself staying in bed too long. I spent Christmas night alone in my room crying over the break up and how alone I always felt.

I was pretty depressed from November to February. That’s when it all began to change. I got a great job. I had purpose again. I had to get up early and I had responsibilities. My circumstances had changed before my attitude had.

Was I happy? I don’t think so. I was happier but I wasn’t happy.

I don’t mean to write this as a religious post – but I am a Christian, and being a Christian to me means living a life that others can look at and respect. I had one evening that was so horrible about three weeks ago. I had been having a great time at work. I was working hard and getting praised. Despite all that – even though my situation was wonderful – I found myself crying one evening. I was home alone and didn’t know who to turn to…so I prayed.

I really didn’t say much. I remember saying “I’m broken. My heart is broken and I can’t do this by myself anymore. I don’t know what to do.”

The following morning was Palm Sunday. I went to church and found that the sermon was all about how God heals the broken-hearted. Literally that was what our pastor said. I couldn’t believe it. I remember sort of looking up and thinking, “So you really heard me yesterday, huh?” The message of the sermon was that once God heals us…we can help others.

It was interesting how…from that moment I found that people were cropping up in my life who were just great people. Interesting, fun, kind. I felt less inhibited by my recent past and all of the heartache that I had endured. I stopped going right home after work and going to my room. I read and wrote at a coffee shop or bookstore. I stayed later to chat with colleagues who were fast becoming friends. I started to meet two Korean girls from my university to show them around the city and help them get acclimated. I spent time with my parents watching TV or movies or just joking around. (I have great parents. Have I mentioned that?)

I started to remember why I had been so outgoing in Korea. It was because of my attitude. I had to have a good attitude because I was in such a foreign place. Having a bad attitude meant you’d spiral really quickly. I saw it happen to other ex-pats. I realized I had to apply those principles to being home. I had to allow myself to be happy in the face of adversity.

These past several weeks have been a complete turn around. I realized there isn’t anything stopping me from being happy. I even realized that part of what I had to do to be myself was live on my own again. This past weekend I thought, “Hey, what’s stopping me?” I left home Saturday morning, found an apartment, put a hold deposit on it, and the application was approved this week. I move in a week and a half.

For a while, I felt going to Korea was the wrong choice. I was certain during those difficult past few months that it had done more harm than good. But I know now that it equipped me with the tools I required. I just had to remember how to use them.

On being an adult…sort of?

I know people who talk about their high school and college days fondly. They talk about those crazy parties and those wild times and being hungover in class and dating as if those were the good times and being an adult is all responsibility and monotony.

I’m not one of those people.

Listen, I didn’t hate college. I did a lot of growing and learning…however I wasn’t outgoing enough to have the college experience we see in movies. I studied and wrote papers and talked to people in class sometimes…and that was it. Once I switched my major from music to English I got great grades. I felt like college was a pitstop on the way to something better.

But this is my problem. I have always felt like what I was doing at any given time was a precursor to something else. I can’t honestly say that I ever took the time to be thankful for where I was in my life at any given time. There was always something better to look forward to.

When I finished school, it was Korea – the bigger and better thing. I moved there, I loved it, but I knew it was temporary.

Korea was a weird thing. It was the first time in my life that I let myself appreciate what I was doing…but it felt…shallow? I don’t know if that’s the right word for it. I guess it was almost fake. It wasn’t my real life. It was like… the Korean currency was like monopoly money. My bills were magically taken from my account every month and I didn’t care. I drank and smoked cigarettes – gross habit that I don’t have anymore – and I dated. I had a serious relationship – the first I had ever had.

Korea was different from other stages of my life though. I wasn’t watching the calendar and counting the days until something better happened. I was trying to have as much fun as possible before I had to go back to the States and be an adult…which to me seemed like the absolute worst thing ever.

In my mind, adults were people who had it all together. They were people with marriages and mortgages and organized plans for everything. They had steady – albeit mind-numbing – occupations and talked about the weather and budgets and whatever was going on in the Middle East.

I can’t go back and be an adult, I thought to myself on many an occasion. I don’t have it all together yet. I’m emotional and anxious and insecure. I still like wearing headbands with cute bows. I like my Hello Kitty wearing sunglasses t-shirt. I’m not married. I’m so disorganized. And I never know what’s going on with the war on terror so however will I converse with anyone. If I happen to find myself in a waiting room of some sort and my reading material choices are limited to newspapers…you had better believe I’m going to read the arts and leisure section. Politics? I don’t think so. What a drag.

But as circumstances would have it, I found myself back in America trying to find a full-time job and feeling too much like a child. Where would I fit in? I had had a full-time job in Korea, sure, but that was Korea where I was away from reality. I hadn’t given the work I was doing much thought. I showed up, taught English, then got drunk 4-5 days a week with friends or coworkers.

So…I get this job I have now…by the grace of God…and the first few weeks were surreal. I wore my professional clothes and talked with adults and had meetings and taught classes to people two and three times my age. I did this all while thinking I was a child compared to everyone. How would they take me seriously…?

Then…the turning point. I was in a meeting with my team – the three of us trainers – and my supervisor asked what concerns we had since we were both new to the training world. I brought up that, “When I’m teaching adults, I feel like I can’t be the authority.”

My supervisor said, “You say ‘adults’ like you’re not one.”

And then my coworker, who is a good 6-7 years older than me, said, “Oh yeah, I feel the same way. You just have to fake it until you believe it.”

Wait a minute. My coworker was an adult…and she still felt this way…? That made absolutely no sense to me. She was supposed to have it all together, right?

Then, through this time I have been teaching, I have talked with my students candidly about their lives. One conversation I had with a woman who is a mother and grandmother has stayed with me.

“Sweetheart,” she told me. “I wish I had it together as much as I did when I was in my twenties. I had all my stuff together. I don’t know how I kept so organized with my kids and working and going to school. I had it all together. I can’t do that anymore.”

So… do any of us feel like we have it all together?

These first few months at this job have been some of the most meaningful and rewarding in my life. For the first time, I don’t feel like I’m waiting for something better. I want to do the absolute best that I can to teach my students. I have met so many people traveling to different locations in this city and it has made me much more outgoing. I am happy. I’m not wondering what I can do after this because I’m too busy having fun.

This, I have decided, is what being an adult is for me. I’m still as emotional and eccentric as I was when I was a teenager. My laundry still sits in a basket until I decide to put it away…maybe two or three weeks after. I don’t feel like I have everything together …and if you bring up politics I’m probably going to awkwardly excuse myself from the conversation. I don’t quite know what’s going on in the Middle East, but I did watch Argo so that counts for something, right?

Being an adult is much more fun than I had anticipated. All it took was being happy with where I am at this time.

“Oh my gosh, your nose is bleeding!”

Let me talk a little bit about my new trainer job and how it compares to my only other professional experience as a teacher in Korea.

I graduated from college and knew that I wanted to see the world before getting a “real job,” but of course, in order to do so, I had to have a job. I chose Korea, as frequent readers of this blog know by now, and started a job as an adult ESL instructor there. This was June 2011. I was a fresh-faced 22-year-old, completely oblivious to the ways of the working world.

Standing with my Chinese Zodiac animal about one month after arriving in Korea.

I was thrown into working almost immediately. I was told I’d have a week of training, but that didn’t happen. I got there, I was still jetlagged, I had no travel experience unless you count that one time we flew to Florida when I lived there in high school, and I was overwhelmed. I worked insane hours. 7AM-11AM, then back again at 5 to work until 9PM. I was tired all the time.

With my bosses. Yep, I’m quite tall. 5’11″ish. I looked tall in Korea.

The thing about working in Korea is that…it is apparently very unlike working in America. My bosses weren’t intimidating women. You can probably tell from the picture that they were sweet and liked me. But they were bosses. There is a big disconnect between boss and employee in Korea. Allow me to explain.

In Korea, the employee is in absolutely no way encouraged to give input. On more than one occasion, I or my coworkers would have an idea about how to improve something or other, and we’d share it, but nothing would change. Our bosses even got a bit…agitated? …if we tried to act like we had a good idea. They didn’t want to hear it.

Creativity? Ha. Creativity is not encouraged in Korea. It isn’t encouraged from a young age as it is here in the US. This means that everyone is very smart – meaning they know a lot of things – but they can’t innovate. It’s odd for a person such as myself who is so creative. We could suggest things and try to innovate or improve the place, but we were so rarely listened to. Only the most persistent among us could change the way things were done. [Hi, Stetson, if you read this. I am referencing those electronic evaluations, sir!]

Bosses can pretty much say whatever they want to employees. HR? …did we have an HR department? I have no idea. But I doubt it. My bosses told me to lose weight, wear makeup, that older male students would like me because I was cute. If I got upset about something, they’d tell me I couldn’t act angry because I was a young woman and had to maintain my “cute” image.

This “say anything” mentality continued when I was sick. I got severe tonsillitis and wasn’t allowed to take a single hour off of work. I, actually, got more classes than ever that week and was dealing with moving to a new apartment. The only time my bosses spoke to me was to tell me that I couldn’t take a day off and to say I could go to the hospital when I had a break so I could get a painkiller injection in order to speak. I was in so much pain and so dehydrated that I went home during each break and when work was finished in the evenings and bawled like a crazy person. But they needed to make money, and as long as I was there teaching, it didn’t matter what kind of shape I was in. The students were paying, so I was going to be there.

Proof that some of my students were sweethearts. See 3. haha!

Don’t get me wrong, I had some amazing students and really value that experience. But, the one weird thing it did was give me unrealistic expectations about working life. I got back to the US kind of…scarred? I took a month to recoup and then decided to start looking for work, but it was almost like I had PTSD. I had been so overworked that thought of working again sent me into a complete psycho panic. I kept thinking, “What if I get sick again and I have to drive all the way to work and feel sick and be sick and it will be horrible?” “What if I have bad hours and my boss is mean and everything is horrible again?!” “Will I have to sign a contract? Will they steal money from me like the Korean company did?!” [another story for another time.]

My mother kept assuring me that this wasn’t the case at all. One month unemployed was enough for me, though, despite my fears of the working world, and I signed up with a temp agency that is actually run through the company I work for currently.

I worked at a car auction for a week and then I was placed at my office. I worked with the facilities department, which was a great experience. I was just a temp, but everyone I met was kind and welcoming. I thought it was because this was my mother’s office, but apparently that wasn’t true. Everyone chatted with me, said good morning to me, et c. My supervisor didn’t hover. She gave me assignments and allowed me to accomplish the work at my own pace and with my own methods.

I got the opportunity, after working there for about two months, to work as a trainer at one of the company’s other locations. I was fortunate because the supervisor that hired me for that knew my history as a teacher. I wound up being offered that trainer job when I applied for a different job with the same supervisor. I was so excited, even though I didn’t actually get the job I applied for. I was thrilled to get to be a teacher again.

Working in the US…what a difference. I mentioned when I wrote about my temping that people were welcoming and my supervisor was not one to hover and micromanage and not encourage creativity. But there’s more differences.

My supervisor hired me because of my creativity. She wants me to work with the other member of our team to revamp the curriculum I teach and encourages innovation. I am constantly shocked to have my input valued. I think my boss is very approachable. I know that if I have a problem, she won’t mind my asking for help. We are also given a great deal more freedom than I had in Korea. I have trudged through torrential downpours and fallen on ice on the sidewalk in Korea, but when we had a snowstorm here this week, I was allowed to cancel my class and work from home. My boss trusts us to make judgment calls.

I don’t feel stressed about getting sick. After the tonsillitis thing, I was so scarred. I know, though, that my boss would let me work from home and get someone to teach my classes if I were so ill.

But, the habits from Korea live on… I am not accustomed to this working environment yet. I expect to be scolded and demeaned and I’m not. I often offer my opinions and creative input, but I get self conscious about it, almost as if I am expecting a bad reaction from my boss – though I don’t get a bad reaction ever.

And as far as getting sick…

I think from stress and/or allergies and/or dryness of where I teach, I got a nosebleed a couple weeks ago. A pretty bad one. I could have gone to the bathroom, taken care of it, and my students wouldn’t have minded. But I shocked them when I grabbed a tissue, shoved it up my nose and continued teaching as if nothing had happened at all.

I guess I would have to say that, while I value the experience I had working in Korea, it was two-sided. I wish I’d had a professional job here before going there, because I would have known what to expect with the one I have currently. But had that been the case, I might have had a hard time adjusting to working in Korea. I don’t know. Korea was a strange thing. I appreciate it so much, but it’s left me a different and somewhat odd person. I feel like I don’t quite fit here and I didn’t quite fit there.

I didn’t expect this post to be so extensive, but I hope it gave some insight into the Korean working world. I suppose some might think that’s interesting?