i grew up consuming society’s advertisement on independence too seriously. it was almost like a moral value, i mean more like a playbook with a set of checkboxes that i had to tick off and own. be strong. build a shiny career, make your own money, need nobody. independence meant accumulating enough capability that nobody could dictate the terms of my life.
i had to defend myself, as a girl, as an immigrant, and as someone who felt that freedom had to be earned against social expectations. korea, where i spent much of my childhood, is an extraordinarily legible society. there are widely understood metrics for evaluating a person: academics, institutions, titles, career, money. your life should make sense on paper.
earlier on, grasping these metrics that society agreed upon was my way of protecting my independence. and it worked. the better i performed against social consensus, the less people bothered me. cool titles like president, valedictorian, prestigious institutions, each title bought me a little territory in which i could be left alone.
it was also fragile.
the more independent i tried to become, the more dependent i became, because i had delegated the judgement whether my life was going well to everyone except myself.
i had confused independence with defensibility.
if someone questioned my choices, i wanted an argument so strong that i could defeat every single one of them. if my parents worried about my future, i wanted credentials powerful enough to silence their worries. if society had a hierarchy, i wanted to climb high enough that i could finally stop caring about it. but you cannot escape a game by winning it, because you are still playing the very game.
i think i always had decent intuition. i knew when things were not right for me. but intuition is difficult to defend. i was young and clueless, so i would pick one goal people called success and brute force myself down that path until i made it. i had a heavy ass and was stubborn enough to push myself to the very end of things, usually until i made myself exhausted.
then i would try another metric. at first those metrics were the obvious ones my parents or society would project onto me: becoming a doctor, collecting achievements that made a person look promising. they were not necessarily bad goals. they were just representations of values that people happened to agree mattered. maybe the conventional way to live, getting educated, getting a well-paying job, building an ideal family, is a real pathway to happiness. for many people it probably is.
but borrowing from david bowie, some people seem to have some kind of disease: something inside that has to be precisely polished, something that pushes away from merely surviving long and strong. i think i have some version of that dis-ease. i have a very specific urge not to be interpreted or consumed in ways i do not want to be. looking back those conventional metrics could have been pathways toward a certain kind of success. but they were not the only path, and definitely not my path.
the problem was that i still did not know what my path meant.
spending childhood between the us and korea, i had views that did not fully align with either society. i dont necessarily think my upbringing gave me fundamentally different values. i increasingly think values that are unapologetically yours are actually much more inherent within people than we assume. i was maybe just lucky enough to discover the contradiction earlier, because i constantly had to challenge my own worldview and ask which model was actually right for me.
when two models contradict each other, neither one can remain invisible. you have to choose.
i think this is where collision started to matter to me. a collision is something from the external world that challenges your existing model strongly enough that you have to update. a person, a city, a rejection, a relationship, a piece of technology, an idea that initially annoys you. something that refuses to fit perfectly inside the model already in your head.
you become clearer through it. sometimes you change the outside thing, sometimes it changes you, and usually both happen a little. the interesting thing is what emerges afterward that existed in neither side beforehand. maybe that is where people actually grow.
