Anyone who knows me well or follows me on Instagram knows how often I come home to Seoul. My friends joke that I treat the near 15-hour flight as if it were a local weekend trip. What was once framed as a privilege—the flexibility and resources that allowed me to fulfill my duties as a loyal sister and daughter, while carrying the guilt and frustration of living so far from my family—has become, over time, a kind of coping mechanism. A way to self-soothe through the very things that once justified my distance: success, drive, and output.
Here I am back in Seoul for the fourth time this year trying to self-soothe myself after an incredibly busy past five months and as I gear up for what the business world calls “Q4”. In my industry speak, that’s code for final-holiday-season-push-to-work-as-much-as-possible. My brain, as it currently stands, straddles the dichotomy of exhaustion and ambition, all the while going through my own little October canon event. “I’m baby,” I would once remind myself, but now I am a fully fledged 30-year old. I am in a messy entanglement of growth and setbacks where the cumulative effect doesn’t look like much progress but I have to trust that all the little decisions I make for myself are amounting to something. These trips home amount to something.
On my plane ride here, I listen to a 3-hour track of 432hz frequency noise on loop in between training my TikTok algorithm to give me exactly what I want to watch. Scrolling, in this instance, is soothing. I dab on an essential oil blend called “Altitude Oil” that I randomly found in a PR package. The combination of everything lulls me into a sleep that feels utterly transformative.
I love the lore of my real life because it is mine to laugh at, mine to love, mine to own. I don’t need anyone else’s on top of mine, something I only recently learned. I once thought I did. I thought being partnered only made life more interesting, more romantic, less isolating. It does do that, in part, but it is also testing. And I don’t have the capacity to be tested like that anymore.
Self-soothing means returning to myself—through movement, through ritual, through flight if I must. It’s not always healthy, not always gentle. Sometimes, self-soothing is recording random tiktok videos and keeping them in my drafts for me to see. Sometimes, it’s sending an email out with a 2am time stamp just to feel in control again. Other times, it’s letting my mother massage my feet in silence.
There’s something deeply human about finding calm in chaos of our own making. We call it “self-care,” but often, it’s a negotiation with our own restlessness. Self-soothing isn’t about escaping discomfort, but learning to recognize it as a signal—one that says I need to come home, whether that’s a place, a person, or just a version of myself that feels familiar again.
“How are things in Korea?” my therapist emails me while trying to find a time to connect. “Always so transformative and comforting.” I reply. Because it’s true. Every time I land in Seoul, I feel a recalibration happen quietly under the surface. I don’t post about it right away. I let the place do its slow work on me. I let myself be small, a daughter again, a version of myself that doesn’t need to be optimized.
Self-soothing, I’m learning, is not about quieting the discomfort, but the trust that I can meet it. That I can survive it. Because I always do.
Despite note having a place to retreat back to like you do, I deeply connected to this. Thank you
🤍🤍🤍