maybe i don't hate winter anymore
reflections on living abroad and finding my way back to myself
The leaves have fallen entirely off the trees. This autumn was more beautiful than I remember autumn to be. It felt like I had never experienced an autumn before. I thought the bare trees, eventually empty of their colorful leaves, would leave me feeling the same kind of empty. But I realized on a drive home one day, as I sped past the blur of brown branches along the highway, that I found a sense of comfort in them. The sturdy brown trees, the golden evening sun streaming through. The winter turns blue and purple as night comes too early. The temperatures have dropped, but I don’t seem to mind it as much as I used to.
I went away last year. I spent five months on the other side of the world. (It’s weird when I try to remind myself of that.) I was around the world, but in the same hemisphere, parallel to my home across the ocean. I saw the same seasons, watching as the year turned from summer rains to autumn yellows to winter flurries.
I look back and can hardly believe I had such an experience. I moved far from home for the first time in my life, but I kept in contact as much as a thirteen-hour time difference would allow. My mother kept me updated with pictures, showing the pumpkins my family carved, my dog running through leaves, the house my aunt bought. In return, I sent pictures of the mountain I hiked, the new coat I purchased, the delicious soup dumplings I ate every week. I was watching home from a distance. I was watching myself from a distance, too.
I went across the globe to grow and change as a person. After experiencing college through a pandemic-cursed online environment for a year and a half, I wanted to finally do something.
This was the first time I headed out in such an independent fashion. No family, no friends— just me. It’s a bit silly that someone so anxious would decide to travel so far away right out of the gate, but I wanted to do something big, prove to myself that I could do anything if I worked hard enough for it. My anxiety was something I was expecting, a known commodity taking a seat next to me on the airplane across the sea. I prepared as much as I could, but planning doesn’t remove the terror of setting foot on foreign soil by yourself for the first time. Finally arriving with my anxiety holding my hand, I realized maybe I didn’t have to squeeze so hard, that I could live without gripping hold to something that wanted to hold me back.
My time in Korea feels like a motion picture I watched for five months in a dark theater, rather than something I experienced. At random times, a glaring image comes back to me and I remember that what I see in my mind was real and true. Learning to do my laundry on a foreign machine. Navigating a novel bus and subway system. Traversing across neighborhoods of a city that people from my hometown barely even know exist.
It doesn’t feel real because I look back and wonder if I felt anything. I don’t think I cried for weeks, sealing my emotions off in a box beneath my bed, next to the loads of laundry I was avoiding.
There was one night, in late November upon the heated floors of my room, I sat cross-legged opposite of my roommate, spilling our guts across the floor and into each other. I came to terms with the closed off nature of my brain. I realized the culmination of items I was ignoring to avoid sadness were impeding on my happiness too. My roommate realized she doesn’t have to be the best at all times, and I realized I didn’t have to prove anything to myself. I couldn’t have come to those realizations without her. Randomly assigned to live with a stranger for five months, I left that room in December with a friend I now can’t imagine life without.
A turning point occurred that night. I wanted to change and grow. Running away from every emotion I refused to embrace can’t be labeled as growth. I only had a few more weeks left in Seoul and more was changing than just the frigid temperatures.
Finally I felt something. My friends and I traversed across Seoul on wine nights, shopping hauls, afternoon study sessions in cafes. These were routine events by that point, but when I look back, I see these events in the chilly air of the winter instead of the humid heat of late summer. My emotions were slowly coming back to me and I remember things more vividly.
But creeping in from behind the joy was an emotion similar to the anxiety from before my trip. I was suddenly scared to go home, to my small hometown. After months of adjustment, I realized I had created a home in this city, and much like that summer, I was scared to leave this new home that I had created all on my own.
As I packed my bags, I also worried about the impending winter. I get sad in the winter, as most people do, and coming home from such an adventure, I was worried it would be worse. I had January and February and March to still get through. An endlessly long, cold, dreary time.
Coming back to my small hometown, my fears that things would be different rang true, but that happens every year when the seasons change. I left in the summer. I left in the height of humidity, a green oasis only bearable with a moment’s reprieve in an air-conditioned car. I came home in the winter. I came home to puffy coats and adding five minutes to my travel time to let my car defrost in the mornings. I came home to the Christmas tree already decorated, the living room stuffed with too many holiday decorations accumulated from too many years of craft festivals.
I went on a drive the day after I arrived home. It was 6:30 a.m. and the sun was just over the horizon. Jet lag was infecting my veins, so I got up, left a sticky note on the counter, and got in my car. I hadn’t driven in five months, but no one else was on the road on that quiet weekend morning. I listened to a Taylor Swift album and drove across the countryside, just like I’d done since high school. I knew the country roads like the back of my hand but the directions were a bit blurry from disuse.
Bare, frosted-over corn fields surrounded the two-lane roads I sped down. The twists and turns had started to feel mundane just a few months ago, but the familiarity was a welcome change to the never-ending traffic of Seoul. The sun warmed my windows and the only other car that passed me was a pickup truck no doubt hauling people that would do more before 7 a.m. than I would do in my entire day.
Looking back at that morning, and the week I returned home, it feels warm, despite the cold December temperatures. I realized I had come home to a place that felt like a comfy cabin on a desolate plain, and I didn’t mind it as much as I had feared.
Despite the warmth of coming home, as the winter continued I felt partly comfortable, partly displaced. Once you leave home, I don’t think you ever stop feeling like you’ve left a part of yourself somewhere else. I’ve left a part of myself in my hometown, forever stuck on a carousel of nostalgia and family hugs. That part wanders through the seasons missing her childhood friends and wonders where different decisions would have led her.
Now there is a part of myself across the world, tasting the best food of her life, riding public transportation all by herself, and collecting memories across a city filled with 10 million people. Drifting aimlessly, she waits around for me to return and see her again. (Will I ever find my way back?)
This year has been weird. Spring barely arrived, and my depression didn’t defrost like it normally does. Summer came and I wasn’t feeling myself. I was in a good place last year, hope and ambition flooding my veins as I sprinted across summer to plant myself in a new place. But this year felt like sludge, focusing on finishing my degree, and trying not to see myself as walking backwards.
I left on my journey knowing I would change, hoping I would grow. I prepared and studied and planned, hoping to get the most out of this incredible trip. I came back different, for sure. More independent, more aware of my boundaries and who I can be outside of my hometown. I also came back a bit hardened, my midwest friendliness rusty with disuse and my emotions in a different place than they used to be.
Maybe the change and growth comes after the fact. Slowly, I’m learning again, to feel my emotions, to write things down, to understand myself. I’m not the same person, but I’m learning again to do the things I need, in different ways this time around. I’m learning my way back to myself, with the understanding that she looks different from who she once was.
I’m scared for winter to set in and for the future to come barreling toward me. I don’t know what will happen for the season or for the rest of my life. I haven’t made many decisions yet. I’m trying my best to focus on the present, but one eye peers toward where I’m going, and I keep looking over my shoulder at where I came from. Life feels like I am at constant battle with myself. But I’m learning to roll with the punches and take my time figuring out where I want to go.
If I cling to the comfort that winter offered me last year, at least I will have something to help me along the way.
I always liked my winter clothes better anyways.
a playlist inspired by my winter feelings and flooded by recent releases by miss swift and the 1975.
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or for hours, nobody can say.”
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
recent vlog of my summer trip to boston:
This is the first BIG piece I’ve written in a while, and hopefully there will be more to come.
Shoutout to all the other substack writers for inspiring me, and my incredible writing professor for motivating me to finally actually get the words on paper (and edit them too). And thank you, whoever you are, for reading my words.
If you feel so inclined, you can subscribe to see more. :)
Until next time,
Em