This is the Kos newsletter: warm email notes from your friend in Seoul. Finding the simple joy in parenthood, bodies, spirituality, creativity, beauty, and living abroad. Sound like your jam? Subscribe below for weekly notes.
What a strange, fast-slow four weeks it’s been. I’ve typed and retyped this newsletter the last three weeks but not sent it. It felt too real to share publicly.
Several weeks ago I was so consumed by anxiety over Ukraine, I couldn’t write about it at all and instead wrote about playgrounds. As one does. (So weird.)
Several weeks ago I didn’t know for sure we were leaving South Korea. Today I do. This June.
Several weeks ago I didn’t know if I would make it past the first rounds of screening interviews. I did. I am going back to work.
Last week I curled into the fetal position in the bathtub and cried while listening to ridiculous pointless pop culture podcasts. I felt a lot better afterward. Baths and pop culture can do that.
In the future, I’ll write more about what it means to leave a place I’ve grown to love so much. I really don’t know how to part with it, honestly. I’m kind of pretending it’s not happening. I know it will be good. It will be great! But the between here and there is asking a lot of something I’m not sure I’ve had since before March 2020.
In the future, I’ll write about what it’s meant to be a stay-at-home mom, return to work full time, get laid off early pandemic, return to work, then leave to move abroad, then return home to work full time again. More than anything I feel so proud of the team my husband and I make together and that is intricately connected to my happy professional life.
In the future, please don’t let me ever forget this place. The friends we’ve made. My boys’ school—their stalwart teachers, cute navy slacks and knee socks, preppy sweaters. The cherry blossoms in the long Korean spring. My morning walks, passing cute older folks stretching, dancing, doing tai chi, or lifting weights in Montmarte Park. The bunnies hopping around at their feet.
In the future, don’t let me forget the very few Korean phrases I’ve learned or how to eat ramen with chopsticks. Or how to be as helpful and kind as our Korean and expat friends have been with us. I only wish I could have grown closer to the friends I’ve met. It feels like a lost opportunity but for one thing we lose, we gain something else, I suppose?
I love America but gosh, my corner of Seoul has become home to me and it won’t be easy to leave it.
I plan to keep writing this newsletter through my move from South Korea back to the United States. With so much up in the air, I may change course and pause the newsletter for a few months until we’re settled. But for now, I want to stay on course as a way to create accountability for myself to catalog the leaving and arriving. This newsletter has become my weekly writing practice. Thank you for reading and following my thoughts and journey. It means so much to me to write to all of you every week.
Koseli
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We will be glad you are back as long as the USPS still works! One never knows...
Exciting news! Always love hearing about your adventures. Wishing you a safe trip to your home in the US. And be sure to take the time to really soak up all that beauty in your current home before you leave. Peace and love.