Working to Live

When I told friends and family about my plans to teach in Korea, the general reaction was disbelief and well wishes. Several people, however, expressed concerns that I might fall in love with Korea (and joked about me falling in love with a Korean) and were worried that I might decide to stay here indefinitely. I swore that I would only stay one year, and that is remains the plan—mainly, because I have grand schemes for 2014/2015, and I don’t intend on diverting from that path.

Having said that, though I have quickly come to understand exactly why people do end up staying here for extended periods of time. It’s all in the lifestyle of the Native Language Teacher. (That’s what we’re called here.)

Let me explain what I mean by first giving you some background information on me and explaining what sort of headspace I was in prior to coming to Korea. While I may come across to most who know me as an easy-going, easy to please, go with the flow kind of guy, that is actually a defence mechanism for me; I'm a very anxious person. The people and the places around me are what keep me stable, help me breathe, so I'm just happy to be around them. 

However, when it comes to my internalized world, I always need to feel like I'm in control, and I stress out easily when things I should be in control over are thrown for a loop. I over-think things, I over analyse things, I calculate everything in my life. It helps me make sense of things if I can see and connect the dots. For this reason, I've always been the type of person who lives in the future, or at least is thinking about the future. I can still live in the moment and enjoy the present, but underneath the surface, I'm still calculating, looking for how to connect those dots.

I think I've always been like that, but I just couldn't verbalize or identify it as a child. But as I got older and my responsibilities piled up and I developed goals for myself, I became fixated on these goals. That's how I became a workaholic.

Within the past year, however, my life goals have changed drastically. Click here for more on that. 

Korea is giving me the opportunity to live the precise life I want to live from here on out: The one where I work to live, as opposed to live to work. I go to work, do something I thoroughly enjoy, and then come home and do something that I passionately love.

But beyond that, by removing one of the largest areas of stress in my life, I have discovered newfound clarity, and the view is beautiful. There's nothing to over analyse or over think here. All you can do is enjoy and appreciate everything as it comes.

I still have a plan that I'd like to follow—one that will hopefully lead to a career as a writer—but the beautiful thing about this plan is that it won't ever consume my life, which is something that I've struggled with in the past. 

Korea is my training ground for learning how to let go.