why did i come to Korea?
The Beginning
I’ve been living (temporarily) in Korea for over three months now. Currently the country doesn’t require a visa* for US citizens, and I’m able to stay for up to 90 days. I completed the first three-month stint on December 21st, went to Japan for a week, and now I’m back in Korea for another two to three months.
It’s funny, because I wasn’t sure if I was going to stay the entire time – in fact, I really made no plans at all – but not only did I decide to stay the full amount of time allotted by the Korean government, I came back and am probably going to end up staying for the second round of three months. If it wasn’t already obvious, I love it here.
You’re probably wondering why the heck I’m in living in Korea for six months, especially if you’re from the US. I love my country, but US citizens have a special skill in believing that America is the best country in the world, when that’s really just one perspective.
I digress. My curiosity about Korea started before I even knew that Korea was a country. My dad lived in Taiwan when he was twenty, so it’s kind of in my blood. Seriously, I’ve always been fascinated with east Asian culture.
When I was a young child, my dad worked in international business and took trips overseas often. One time, he came back with a present for me. It was a beautiful piece of calligraphy script done in Mandarin with his nickname for me: little flower.
The piece drew me in; it blew my mind that the symbols were an actual language that people used to communicate with each other.
It still hangs in my childhood bedroom to this day.
When I was a teenager, the movie adaption of the novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, came out and it became my favorite movie. Japan was put on the map for me. It shocked me to see the life that so many women lived decades ago, but it also disappointed me to learn that the geisha culture was no longer such a prominent thing. I wanted to go and experience it myself.
In college, my room was literally “Asian-themed,” with prints taken in the streets of Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Seoul, and a black and white bamboo comforter.
It was during my time in LA that I lived with three Chinese-American girls and learned more about Chinese culture. My roommate whom I shared a bedroom with was from China, and she taught me how to say, “I like cats,” in Mandarin, although that knowledge has long been forgotten.
Living close to the sea and being so immersed in a melting pot of cultures increased my love of seafood, ethnic food, and especially sushi. I ate soooo much sushi during those three years, I’m surprised I didn’t turn into a fish myself. 😊
In 2018/2019, I got a job at a local Asian-fusion restaurant run by a Vietnamese couple. The food was delicious and only furthered my obsession with Asian cultures.
The Pandemic
During the pandemic, I finally learned how to cook (thanks mom!), and I found myself constantly drawn to all the Asian-inspired recipes, even trying my hand at some authentic quisine, like bibimbap. I made my own gochugang sauce and everything.
All I wanted to eat was Asian food – Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean – whenever it was my night to cook, I always cooked something in that realm. (Although, now that I’m in Korea, I see how Americanized those recipes were.)
It was also during the pandemic when the first seeds to go to Korea were planted. When Korea really came into my awareness as a country. That it was not in fact the same as Japan (as many westerners ignorantly believe), and that it has a heavy history with Japan after being occupied by them for 35 years until they regained independence during World War II. (And after traveling to Japan, i saw how different the two cultures really are.)
One day, YouTube randomly suggested a video to me, “How I Became Fluent in Korean.” In the video, a cute college-aged American girl explained why she started learning Korean, and how she loved Korean culture, kpop, kbeauty and all the great things about Korea.
I didn’t think much of the video and continued on with life. During the pandemic, kpop really broke into US pop culture and I started hearing more about it, although I didn’t really care much, because I don’t like pop music in general. I think I tried listening to a BTS song, but it wasn’t really my vibe.
In 2021, when the Delta variant of the virus was inciting a new wave of intense illness, and people were at each other’s throats about the v!xx, I was living in blissful ignorance with the hippie people of Oregon as I traveled in and lived out of my Jeep Grand Cherokee.
As my trip was coming to a close, I distinctly remember a moment when I was packing up my stuff, and I wondered, “What now God?” What now do I do with my life? Things were still super funky in the country, I had been dealing with a chronic injury for over a year at that point, and I had no idea what sort of job I’d get when I got back to Colorado.
Clear as day, God spoke to my heart, and said, “Go to Asia.”
That made me stop. Do a double take. I understood that the Lord didn’t mean right then and there. Travel restrictions were still high in most countries and I had maybe $200 to my name at that point.
But I knew that God meant those were future plans for me. Funny how I was asking about the immediate problems, but God was giving me hope. Hope to hold onto as I stepped into a deeper season of healing. one that would take everything within myself to keep going over the next three years.
That same summer of 2021, within the week I got back to Colorado, the kdrama, Squid Game, hit Netflix and broke the world record for most watched Netflix show ever, and with good reason. I binged the entire show in two days. It broke records on Netflix and again, gave Korea even more attention from the world.
The Discovery
Funny enough, I didn’t get into kdramas after that. It wasn’t until January of 2023 did I get sucked into the wonderful black hole of kdramaland, when Netflix suggested a Korean reality dating show called, Single’s Inferno.
Trashy dating shows have always been my guilty pleasure, and I was intrigued. It was delightful. Right away culture shock hit me as the singles arrived and introduced themselves to one another. They were so polite. So awkward. And the clothes! The women looked like perfect dolls from their flawless skin to their ultra-feminine ruffles and lace. They were on a hot, tropical island. How did they look so perfect?! How were they not sweating?!
Above all else, the Korean language entranced me. I couldn’t believe how foreign it sounded to my ears, the sounds so garbled, sometimes guttural and strange, and at the same time… beautiful. Right then and there, I decided I wanted to learn how to speak Korean, but even then, I thought, why? Why would I learn such a foreign language. I didn’t know anything about Korea other than its pop music, shows, and beauty products are top notch.
I sort of resisted the pull that Korea had on my soul for a while. It just didn’t make sense to me. But over time, as Netflix suggested more shows, and I got into the kdramas and loved how different everything was from western culture, I became more intrigued.
These shows became a safe haven, an escape from the deep emotional work I was going through as I struggled to let go of an abusive ex and heal from all the trauma. It was so easy to fall into another world that was so different from mine and forget all my problems. My ears became familiar with the sounds of the Korean language, and I found myself wanting to speak it more and more. I started watching cultural videos, curious to learn more.
In May 2023, I started learning Hangul, the Korean alphabet. I took a free online course offered by Yonsei University, one of the colleges here in Seoul. I wasn’t consistent and each small lesson took me forever, but I loved it.
I hadn’t done any learning like this in soooo long, where I was actually writing notes and doing homework and stuff. Learning Korean unlocked a different part of my brain that I hadn’t used in years, and it felt so good, even if learning the language was – and still is – incredibly difficult and frustrating.
The more YouTube videos I watched, the more I started thinking about visiting. I started praying about it and God said, not right now. It was disappointing, but I understood. I knew then that if I went to Korea, I’d just be running away from my problems and it wouldn’t make me any happier.
God gave me explicit instructions. I could watch kdramas. I could watch cultural videos. But I should avoid any sort of trip planning because I’d just get tunnel vision, as I tend to do when it comes to traveling. So I didn’t watch any videos or read any blogs on where to stay or what to do in Seoul. I didn’t look up flights or airbnbs. Even though I wanted to. Even though I thought about it.
Instead I educated myself on what not to do as a foreigner should I visit, I learned about the pros and cons of the culture, and learned about social norms. I watched some videos on what it’s like to live in Korea as a foreigner, what it’s like to date in Korea as a foreigner, that sort of thing.
And I kept learning Korean, even though most days it made me want to bang my head against the wall.
Then in August 2023, God gave me another big word. He said I was going to Korea! I was joyful, I was ecstatic! I couldn’t believe that this was actually happening!
When? I asked, God.
Not yet, he said.
And before my joy could deflate like a balloon, he told me, next year.
In August of 2023, I also started my virtual assistant business. I focused on that. I focused on my healing. I was busy, but kept practicing Korean whenever I had time. I started downloading apps to help me. I invested in an online course, Talk to Me in Korean during their Black Friday sale, and even bought some workbooks.
My love of Korean continued to grow. It was all I wanted to work on, but with the creative demands of my job, I didn’t have much brain space for learning such a difficult language. Still, I tried my hardest to do it consistently, even though it ended up going more in waves, depending on my workload from my business.
I continued like this for several months. My business grew and it took up a lot of my time. I kept watching cultural videos. I kept watching kdramas. I made friends through a language exchange app and attempted to practice Korean with them. I would practice Korean every day for a week straight, and then go weeks without doing it.
Still, in my mind, a plan started to form. I was hopeful that I could go to Korea in the fall of 2024, but I knew I wasn’t quite ready yet.
The Direction
In May of 2024, after nearly two years of going on a journey to heal from the most impactful (and traumatic) relationship in my life, I let go. I fully let go of my ties to that connection and I chose to move on.
That is an entirely different blog post, and one I will probably write, but the incredible thing that happened was that God gave me the green light on Korea.
Why? Because I let go of that person, of those memories of that relationship. I chose myself in a way that was so deep it’s kind of hard to describe. But I did what God was asking me to do. I let go.
And on the same day of letting go, and I mean immediately after I performed a ceremony where I burned all the memorialbia from that relationship that I’d been holding onto, God told me that I could go to Korea.
It’s important that I share this, because there is power in trusting God and following his will for your life. I had to let go of something (or someone) that was taking up soooo much of my heart space in order to receive what God had for me next.
It was such a wild spiritual experience. I was sitting on the couch after being outside for two hours burning all the things, kind of in a daze because it was a huge release energetically, and I didn’t even ask God what was next.
He just told me, joyfully, loudly, in way I’d never heard God speak before, that I could go to Korea. It was heavenly energy. I could feel God, feel the heavens celebrating this incredible obstacle that I had just overcome, that I had worked so damn hard to get through over the past two years.
And now, on the side of heaven, there was joy. I was going to Korea.
Okayyyyy, what? I was jolted out of my stupor.
It couldn’t be that quick, could it? Normally, after I go through a big process of any sort, God is more slow to give me the next step. Certainly calmer. The spiritual energy I felt that night was unlike anything I’d ever felt from God before.
Maybe because this letting go was a really big deal. Maybe because I was finally following God’s instruction whole-heartedly after resisting for so long. (Dealing with my repressed trauma brought up so many emotions, and I had had to face the love I still had for my ex. I talk more about this in this blog post here.)
The joy of the Lord is a wild thing, ya’ll.
I kept asking God if I heard him right, and I’ve never heard or felt such a “yes.” It seriously felt like heaven was having a party on my behalf and the confetti sparkles were raining down on me from where I sat in my living room.
I booked my flight a week later. I decided that September would be a good time to go. I had about three months to plan for the trip, and plan I did. It became all-consuming. Between planning my trip and trying to reach a new goal in my business, I was so busy.
Has God ever given you something, and then you experience an insane level of spiritual warfare as the enemy tries to take it away from you?
I did. Those three months during summer were not fun. In fact, my excitement for going on my first solo trip abroad petered out pretty quickly and was soon replaced with a shit-ton of anxiety and fear and stress. I began to even dread going. i also felt no motivation to actually look up what to do in Korea once I got there.
I agonized over what to pack, how many bags to bring. Somehwere along the way, I started to develop a new plan. Since I was going all the way across the world, I might as well make the most of it. I wanted to go to Korea for maybe two months, then Japan for a month, and then go down to New Zealand for the winter because it would be summer there.
I didn’t realize then that I had taken what God had given me and totally ran with it, far away from him and essentially leaving him in the dust. But trying to plan for multiple countries and multiple seasons gave me soooo much unnecessary stress.
I was terrified that I was going to feel super isolated in Korea. through it all, I even began to feel… depressed.
No seriously. I was finally getting the trip of my dreams, God was bringing his promise from years ago to life, and I was dreading it and feeling like shit mentally.
I had never had this much fear around a trip before. I had never really had true fear when it came to traveling in general. Nervousness? Sure. But anxiety and fear over something that made my soul happy? I didn’t feel like myself.
Exhausted.
Depressed.
Anxious.
Worried.
Scared.
The biggest question I had was why? Why was I even going to Korea? Sure, I was interested in the culture and learning the language, but did that mean I needed to travel there?
Everything about this trip felt different than my other trips. I kept asking God, not only why he said I could go, but why he was guiding me there. This trip was much more involved with the Spirit than my other trips and given how awful I was feeling, it made me doubt… everything. I couldn’t see a real reason as to why I should go. Like I said, the spiritual attacks were unhinged.
These negative emotions circled my mind in the weeks leading up to my trip.
I struggled with burnout with my business, but I kept working, even when I didn’t meet the goals I had set for myself and a big risk ended up failing.
I pushed my leave date for my trip back by a couples of weeks, to give myself more prep time, but I didn’t cancel the trip.
Nothing, not fear of the unknown, not the overwhelming amount of “what ifs.” I lived in a van before. I lived out my car before. I could certainly go to a foreign country by myself.
The “Why”
On September 21st, 2024, I left the US, and after a full 24 hours of travel, I made it to South Korea.
I’m grateful to say that a lot of the fear surrounding the trip did dissipate quickly once I remembered my inherent ability to just figure shit out. Van life had been the best first step. I realized that I already had a lot of the skills needed for my first international trip. I’d done solo travel before. I knew about safety. I knew how to problem solve and use critical thinking skills. And, my prep with the language, even the tiny bit I knew, helped me immensely.
I wish I could say that my mood immediately shifted, and my all energy came back instantly, but that would be a lie. I loved Korea, and I was having a lot of fun, but it didn’t change the fact that I still felt completely, and utterly exhausted.
While many of the negative emotions had left me, I was just so tired. I reflected on how much I did during van life; how many miles I covered, how many national parks I visited, and music festivals I attended, and the amount of sights I’d seen since arriving in Korea seemed miniscule in comparison.
I still didn’t feel good mentally.
About one month into my trip, when I escaped the massive capital of Seoul, for Sokcho, a small city in the northeastern part of the country where the mountains met the sea, I was able to clear my mind.
It’s always been I get into nature that I hear from God. Once I settled the external noise, and was away from the many distractions of the city (hello staying out until 6am because the bars stay open all night, 😊), I was able to hear from the Lord.
I finally learned the why. Why I was in Korea. Why I felt the need to stay… maybe even stay the entire 90-day visa free time block allotted by the Korean government for US citizens.
Can you guess the reason?
While it’s unfortunately not so I can have a real-life kdrama moment and meet the hot, rich, but troubled heir who’s going to sweep me off my feet, it is still a very good reason.
Rest. God brought me across the world to give me… rest.
I know, I know. It feels a little anticlimactic to type this out, but in the moment, it felt like everything clicked into place.
The reason I was struggling with depression, exhaustion, and fatigue was because of how hard I’d worked over the past several years.
At the end of 2019, I lost my cousin. 2020 brought on the pandemic, a serious injury that incapacitated me for years, and a serious sense of not having any direction.
I started therapy in early 2021. In summer of 2022 I embarked on the arduous journey of working on specific trauma related to a specific ex, and for nearly two years, I brought all my suppressed emotions to the surface. I worked them out, faced the pain, and ultimately let go.
In the past five years I had walked through immense grief, physical pain, feeling lost and hopeless; I had done the incredibly difficult work of facing my trauma, and all of it, this strange season of five years, it had truthfully left me incredibly drained.
We recently welcomed 2025, and there’s one of those “post yours” on Instagram where it says something like, “the scary jump from 2019 to 2024.”
Scary indeed. I think many of us look back on the last five years and can collectively think, “what the f*ck?”. They were hard on most of us, challenged us in ways we weren’t expected to be stretched, and left us feeling bone-weary.
I was so tired. I had been tired for years, and still I had pushed on. I had gotten to this point within myself where I’d let go of the biggest thing holding me back, I had fought and had won that spiritual battle, and instead of feeling empowered and confident, I felt completely burnt out.
God works in crazy ways. He brought me to the other side of the world to first and foremost… rest.
“This time in Korea is a time of recovery. Spend more time with me. Take things slow, go with the flow. Korea is your reward for letting your ex go. You would’ve never come here had you chosen him. This is a season of learning how to get your joy back.”
These are the words God spoke to me, words that I wrote down in my journal. Understanding clicked into place for me. It all made so much sense! I wrote in my journal:
It all makes so much sense now. So many questions answered. I remember how over the summer God kept telling me that I was ready for Korea and I could go at any time. That’s because this is the healing place. the recovery zone. And I remember feeling so perplexed, almost weirded out, when God told me I could’ve left the very next day after officially letting my ex go in May had I wanted to. I didn’t feel ready, given my mental state, but that’s exactly why God wanted me to come here!!! For a refresh. A restart. A new life for a little while. Adventure and meeting people and trying new things. The stuff about travel that lights me up! but not on some busy schedule. A slower pace. A time to rest. Revive. Get my joy for life back.
This knowledge was the first kernel of hope that brought me out of the darkness I’d been in for so long. My energy did start to shift. My mood started to improve. Things started to change, only when I allowed them to.
And now, nearly four months into my journey in Korea, I am getting my joy back. Truthfully, surrendering and trying to “rest” hasn’t been easy. When I’ve been working so hard for years, grinding, and hustling and moving, it’s hard to slow down.
Thanks be to God, the ultimate provider for giving me this incredible gift of rest while living in a foreign country. God brought me to Korea because I love the culture. God brought me to Korea as a reward for making it through the hardest season of my life, and following his direction, even when I didn’t want to. God brought me to Korea to rest. Restore my weary soul. And get my joy back.
This post is already way too long but stay tuned for upcoming posts on my journey on how I’ve actually gotten my joy back and energy restored, as well as my experience on dating in Korea, and ultimately, how I’ve struggled with my desire for a relationship during a season when God has still told me… not yet.
Thank you for being here with me on my journey. I pray that my story shows you the goodness of God and empowers you to overcome whatever challenges and mental health struggles you may be facing, and that always, you are never alone. <3
*If you’re planning a trip to Korea, please check the government website for updated information about visa-requirements, as this may have changed from the time of this post.
