{"id":136,"date":"2013-08-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2013\/08\/17\/post-129-on-fear-travel-and-coming\/"},"modified":"2013-08-17T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-17T00:00:00","slug":"post-129-on-fear-travel-and-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2013\/08\/17\/post-129-on-fear-travel-and-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-129: On Fear and Going Abroad"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nI appreciated the following essay. It’s by an Australian who <\/span>has been in Korea for almost three years, the same as I: \n<\/div>\n
\nOn Fear, Travel, and Coming to Korea<\/a><\/strong><\/font>
By “The W<\/span>aegukin”\n<\/div>\n

[T]he main reason I first came to Korea was to force myself to confront fear. Actually, this is not a particularly unusual reason; I\u2019ve met a few people who\u2019ve had similar epiphanies and ended up in Korea because of them.<\/p>\n

<\/span>At the time I had been working from home and living alone for nearly two years. For an introvert this can be an appealing way to arrange your life, but in the long term it\u2019s pretty dangerous to your mental health. For me, I was fine with that for a long while, and then I wasn\u2019t fine anymore, and things fell apart for a bit. When I pulled myself back together, I had as a key understanding that I needed to do something radical with my life; something that would shake me out of my slumber and re-introduce some risk, because I had made things perfectly safe for myself, and that had become a problem.<\/span>
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<\/span>Shortly after that, I was looking through job advertisements in the hope of finding something different to do, and came across an ad for teaching English in Korea. It was far more \u201cdifferent\u201d than what I had consciously been looking for, and I was immediately gripped by a realization; that the idea was terrifying to me, and that it was also absolutely what I needed to do, and that if I didn\u2019t do it, my realization about what I needed to do with my life was phony, and I was just a coward.
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<\/span>So I started going through the process, and in less than three months I was in Korea, and it was probably the best decision of my life.
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<\/span>Now I am not, despite appearances, a brave traveler. The thought of the unknown is scary to me; the idea of being lost in a city where I don\u2019t speak the language, with nowhere to stay for the night, is and continues to be a great fear of mine. So it wasn\u2019t easy for me to make the decision to come to Korea, but as with most such decisions, the brave option is the better one<\/strong>; it sure beat the hell out of another year of living alone and working from home.
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<\/span>Before I came, I got two pieces of really good advice from……. [Continue Reading<\/a>]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/span>I find a lot to sympathize with in the essay.<\/p>\n

<\/span>A few months ago, I tried to write about my first night’s experiences (post 46<\/a> and 47<\/a> and 48<\/a> and 49<\/a> and 50<\/a> and 51<\/a> and 52<\/a>) but I never finished. I never even got to the “punchline”. Maybe later. The reason I was able to write so much about that night was that I, too, was definitely scared about coming to Korea and scared when I first arrived. In those circumstances, memories stick, of course.\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I appreciated the following essay. It’s by an Australian who has been in Korea for almost three years, the same as I: On Fear, Travel, and Coming to KoreaBy “The Waegukin” [T]he main reason I first came to Korea was to force myself to confront fear. Actually, this is not a particularly unusual reason; I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}