Daring Greatly

My worldly possessions are in a newly built condo, awaiting my arrival in a new town six and a half hours from my current house. Before I leave the city I've called home since 1989, I'm compelled to take a picture of my walk-in closet, emptied and ready for the next inhabitant. The person who occupies this space will never know that this functional, fashionista's paradise is larger than the last place I lived with my birth mom in Korea, before I was whisked off at age 6 to be adopted by American parents.

My birth mom's few possessions--two metal rice bowls and chopsticks, a couple of pans and one change of clothes--were stacked on a rickety shelf attached to a rotting wall.  This immovable fixture took up half of the hovel we were forced to call home. My mom and I slept on our sides on the other half of the floor, lined up like Dominoes because there was no room to lie flat. We alternated whose back would be wedged against the shelf and who would face the outer wall. Our arms, crooked at the elbow, served as our pillows as we shivered through the windswept nights.

The image of that dirty den, and the haunting feelings accompanying that time period, remained buried deep in my psyche until I began prepping to move. My clean closet ala Carrie Bradshaw transformed into a Star Trek holodeck where images of my first life were superimposed on its walls. My mental slide show flashed me back to a life of scarcity, where I battled the soul-crushing effects of constant hunger, want and fear. A yearning to escape the endless sameness was outweighed only by my desperate desire to cling to my mom, the center of my steadily crumbling universe.

My life changed forever when my mom reluctantly relinquished me to worldly, teacher parents who would fill my stomach and mind with gifts from a horn of culinary and intellectual plenty. The promise of prosperity would be fulfilled but not without cost. It's always been easy to acknowledge how brave my mom was to walk away from a child she had worried about, and apologized to, for being inadequate (her words) for more than six years. But what I've never steeped in is the reality of a six year old's sense of emotional free-fall as she was stripped of her language, her primary relationship, fragile identity and street-savvy culture in one seemingly innocuous transaction--the transfer of custody from one party to another.

Not until I began my recent month-long farewell tour of lunches, dinners and parties with my current friends and colleagues did I truly process my dormant yet real need for transition from my third-world circumstances to my first-world, technicolor residency in the states. Our culture loves the before, or back story, so long as the after is triumphant or transcendent. I'm too young to declare victory on my social evolution, so there is no after just yet. Where I am, though, is at a place willing to acknowledge but not surrender to, my primal sense of abandonment, grief and ambivalence over the change that altered the trajectory of my life. I'm learning to ride a wave of liminality to a stronger place of self acceptance, and to have compassion for others in the grip of their own transitions.

In Daring Greatly, Brene Brown reminds us that "courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen” in a state of vulnerability.  “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness,” Brown continues.


I registered this blog with the intent to wax rhapsodic about the feasts of the senses and of the spirit in my new hometown. I realize that I can only begin to celebrate the abundance of movable feasts yet to manifest if I am unabashedly honest with myself about my shadow side and all that transition demands of me. 

"Numb the dark and you numb the light," Brown assures us. I have felt the dark, and now I embrace the light that is to come.