Today at 12:35 pm, I turned 50 and began my fifty-first rotation around the sun. I am writing from Korea, inside a 400-year-old hanok, a traditional stick-frame house with a clay-tiled roof. It’s the perfect place to start our adventure in Seoul.
I feel emotional being here in the motherland. I am thinking of my parents, who died before their time (36 and 76), and about my older siblings. We never made this trek together as a family, and I wonder how this experience would have impacted our identity growing up in rural Oregon. To witness an entire country filled with people who look like us, who eat the same foods as us, and who have the same mannerisms as us … it changes your perspective. Knowing your life exists in multitudes gives you a sense of place in the world.
I feel incredibly grateful to be here for the first time with my kid, who is Korean, Irish, and Scottish. 93% of the time we spend with our children happens between birth and eighteen, so all this togetherness feels like a remarkable gift to give to ourselves. It will likely be one of the few times we spend this much time with one another as adults, and I appreciate the opportunity of it.
Lately, when my kid and I are doing something significant together, I look over and tell them, “We’re making core memories.” It always elicits a huge laugh, but I really mean it. It’s a way of making light of the fact that life is fleeting, and this moment will be something to look back on once I’m gone.
On this particular birthday, I actually feel like I have grown up a bit and have started to carry the wisdom that has accumulated over the years like a precious gift. One of those pieces of wisdom is accepting there is so little I know about how the world works. There will never be enough time to know everything, so I can relax already and pick and choose where I put my attention. It feels especially important this year with all the tumult in the world.
The other nugget of wisdom is something says: Everything is liminal. I embody this more and more as I age. The things I cared about so deeply two years ago don’t matter as much anymore. They’re still important, just less important. Right now, my life is transitioning from doing things that make me feel good about myself to doing things that bring me and those around me more joy and peace. It is a wonderful thing to put focus and energy toward.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about free will versus determinism. It’s come up in conversations, and I’ve latched onto the thought exercise for myself. For the past five decades, I have been a staunch believer in “free will” and have based my entire reality on the notion that I am the captain of this ship and have willed this beautiful life into existence. I’ve taken great pride in persevering in the most dire childhood circumstances and calling myself “the exception to the rule” because, statistically, things should have gone in a much different direction for someone like me.
Over the years, this “exception to the rule” mentality has become this drive to become exceptional. At 50, it feels like a treadmill to nowhere. I am starting to believe I attached myself to these labels because they gave me a sense of control over my life—a remnant of early childhood trauma. The belief that “everything would turn out okay because I would make it okay” gave me confidence and hope for my future. It carried me through the early years of being a mother when I was poor and scared that I would fuck it all up. It carries me through this break as I look toward an uncertain future. Believing you can do something is one of the most potent forces in the world. But it, too, is fallible.
This “do anything” mindset crumbled a bit in the past year when what I wanted to happen in life didn’t quite work out. No matter how many plans I made, how many potions I took, how many relationship interventions I tried, or how many posts I wrote, nothing I did worked out the way I envisioned—not a single thing.
I used to tell myself failure or defeat was just the universe’s way of telling me I was headed in the wrong direction. A “no” means “next opportunity!” I’d say to others in their low moments. But there were an unusually high number of “no’s” in Chapter 49, and it humbled me—a lot. I still have hope some things will turn out okay with a little more time and patience, but there’s no rush. I will go about my business and let life unfold.
As I enter my fifties, I am starting to shift my perspective on “free will.” Not entirely, but in a notable way. If I look back on the past five decades, nothing turned out as I had hoped. I am not where I thought I would be. I never had the courage to dream of this life! It’s so wonderful.
Last night, at 12:45 am, my kid and I were sitting outside in the cold, waiting for a piece of lost luggage to arrive. Our Airbnb doesn’t show up in navigation apps correctly, and we were worried that our delivery driver wouldn’t know where to go. Paranoid, we both sat on the curb at the top of our hill, waiting for them in the hour window they gave us.
“Are you cold, Jae?” I asked.
“Freezing.”
“Go back inside and get some sleep. I can wait by myself.”
“No.”
“We don’t both have to be here.”
“But we’re making core memories, Mom.”
I fell over laughing. This was not the birthday activity I had planned, but I’ll never forget this moment of sitting on a curb in Korea with my kid, making jokes in the middle of the night, waiting for the delivery driver to come.
It was the perfect end (it’s tomorrow in Korea) to my birthday, and I wouldn’t want to change one bit of it.
Love,
Giyen
