Today is March 8, exactly half a year from my birthday, and exactly six months from when I arrived in Korea to stay. I arrived the night before with a work visa, which meant my 42nd birthday was my first full day living in Korea, not just traveling.
I’m still finding my way, at work and in my personal life. I still feel helpless a lot of the time, cut off by a language I feel like I should know better by now. I have friends here, some of them close, but I still feel new and disconnected. I’m an alien, so I suppose it’s not so strange that I feel alienated. It’s also exhilarating sometimes, and much of the time it’s just ordinary. I live here, go to work in an office, come home, sit on the couch, have a snack. Sometimes the very normality still weirds me out. I feel like I still have no idea how to make this work, even though I’m making it work.
3653 days at a time
Today is also my sober anniversary. Ten years. No, I’m not celebrating with a drink.
Ten years ago, my life was a mess. My marriage was coming apart, I was quitting a decades-old pot habit, I was deep in debt to the IRS. I lost most of my friends in the divorce, changed jobs, and moved out to Bay Ridge, where I went to an AA meeting and was told, “Hi, I’m Michael, and this is Ant-knee. You’re gonna meet a lotta Michaels and Ant-knees down here.” The recurring memory I have of that time is walking home from the subway carrying two plastic bags, a tub of Ben & Jerry’s in one and a Subway sandwich in the other, listening to Radiohead sing about “15 steps, then a sheer drop” on my iPod and crying.
Remember iPods?
It was not a good time.
Ten years gone
Ten years later (three of them leap), it’s astonishing how much has changed, mostly for the better. I’m grateful to the help I got along the way from new and old friends, good therapists, loving family, mediocre bosses, twelve-step programs, Landmark Education. I suppose the biggest thing I learned in that time in my life was how to ask for help — how to be humble enough to admit that I don’t know how to do everything already.
Another important lesson was that everyone will leave you eventually no matter what, and you just have to deal with that. That sounds harsh, but it’s how the universe is organized. Even if we stay friends to the end of our days, we’ll part when we die. In accepting change and loss, I found an opening to living in the moment, enjoying the time we have instead of trying to preserve the present for the future.
I also learned to invite everyone to everything, and I still do that, more or less. Just ask a bunch of people what they’re up to this weekend and see who makes time for you. Because those people are your friends. They might not be the people you picked out at first as the most exciting or attractive or whatever, but they care enough about you to show up, which is way more important.
The next ten years
You might have noticed by now that I’m a bit obsessed with the passage of time. What percentage of my life have I spent abroad? How many days has it been since I started at Samsung? I keep track of this sort of thing in spreadsheets.
But all that tracking of the past hasn’t made the future any easier to imagine. I don’t know what the next decade will be like. Will I still be here in Korea? What will my life be like? The only thing the tracking really does is make it clear that ten years is a very long time and remind me that I’m still at the beginning of whatever this is I’m doing with my life now.