Lifelong Frustration 

I've carried a lifelong frustration. 

In Saudi Arabia, I grew up in a hodgepodge of international cultures and groups with unspoken "legal" demarcations that made no sense -- like between men and women or between geopolitical lines, and we still figured out ways to live together. 

And in within this "legal" demarcations, there was additional hierarchal division. This division was undeniably determined by skin color, language, and title - position of power. Even though sometimes I could tell that the person in whiter skin color and in higher position of power didn't deserve the respect of everybody. 

In early childhood, I only knew one language and my home and belonging was singular - I was Korean and that was my center. I couldn't even dream for it to be any different. 

But once I moved into a boarding school in Austria at age 12, and began to form another center (home) within me as some kind of a European-raised American-school-educated who's never been to America. I started to feel like there's two of me, or three of me, or four of me, depending on how much you zoom in or out of perspective. 

And this became my frustration. I'd keep meeting the most brilliant, intelligent, capable cross-cultural humans that lived with such dark, low, tiny sense of self disguised as beautiful humility. The brilliance was mostly within who they are - I mean in their family, what they already knew, something in their blood DNA, so-to-speak. And on top of that they could see what their family couldn't - because they had also become a European American. We all did - maybe the European American is the title of a skill we all were adopting, in order to survive in "globalized" economy. I write "globalized" in quotation marks because this too is just a label disguising deeper truth. 

My Ancestors

This is the unexpected gifts I received during my year (2024-2025) in South Korea - fully living here as my home. Korean culture in general and my family culture in particular had a strong patriarchal flavor. It didn't help that we took this home culture to ultra patriarchal Saudi Arabia. 

And so I knew very little about my mother's family. All the stories about Korea and grandparents growing up revolved around paternal family. After my father passed away 2 years ago, I moved to South Korea to be with my mother. 

There's so much I learned about my lineage and ancestral trauma and blessings during this time. I will share one here. 

During my plane ride moving back to Korea, I was journaling and I wrote a question like... 'what am I going to do when I arrive in Korea?' Because I didn't know what I'm going to do, who I'm going to meet, it felt like I was starting over. In that blank page, one word dropped in, a word that I never really thought of before, nor familiar at all. Pansori. It's a Korean cultural, ancestral grief musical-like music. As an intuitive, I'd already been sensing that my ancestors were calling me back to my motherland and so when I read this word on my journal, I felt that it was a guidance from my ancestors. As soon as I landed in Korea, I enrolled myself in Pansori class. And I started singing Pansori at weekly meetings and at home. 

To my complete surprise, my maternal grandfather was not only a Pansori singer, he was the village's main Sang-Yeo-Kun (상여꾼) someone who led the procession of a funeral with the grief music. My singing at home while mom's around unlocked so many stories about my grandfather and grandmother. It confirmed over and over in my heart that it made total sense I'd been walking the path of supporting global souls through their deep and ambiguous grief of crossing borders, identities, and worlds.  

Multiple Burn Outs

I write in previous post that every crisis is an opening, a doorway towards who you truly are. Throughout my career, I kept meeting a limit and that limit was experienced as a severe burn out. It's only after I've taken some moment to pause and rest (which also took a health crisis to learn), that I understood what I experienced in my past was a burn out. 

First burn-out moved me to reconnect with travel and God, then the second burn out moved me to Nature, listening to my body, travel as search for home. The third time... moved me to Motherland, roots, ancestors, and the feminine. 

It's my lifelong frustration, ancestral guidance, and the passion to live differently than to push through life that has led me to create Octopus and Stitch.